Category Archives: Education

Servant to the masses

June 25, 2008 – 11:07 pm

I’ve written before about how frustrating it is to be a sessional staff member at a university: I am an “un-person” without clear status and rights. “How long are you taking off on maternity leave?” asked one colleague the other day, and I fixed her with a wry glance. “Maternity leave? Um, this coming term, [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Personal | Comments (6)

Intellectualism and the Emperor’s New Clothes

June 5, 2008 – 8:51 pm

I’ve been reading the interesting string of posts on the question of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. It all started off at PrawfsBlog, where Rick Hills explained why he was an anti-intellectual. At Slate, Eric Posner and Richard Ford mounted a defence of intellectualism, while still maintaining a dislike of deliberate obscurantism.
Hills’ example of intellectual obscurantism was Judith Butler’s [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Law, Philosophy, Society | Comments (31)

Teaching students to read a full case

May 24, 2008 – 10:00 pm

I’ve just marked a bunch of essays. One thing that made me particularly liable to get out the red pen with a vengeance was if the student cited an extract of the case from the casebook, rather than going to read the original case. You see, we are a common law country in Australia (although [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Law | Comments (11)

Teaching by example

April 27, 2008 – 9:54 pm

A science teacher friend told me that “teaching by real life example” is all the rage these days. People have to run around the room pretending to be electrons, rather than learning about electrical current in the abstract. It’s supposed to make learning more “approachable” and easier. A creditable aim, but I am afraid that [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Children | Comments (3)

Student evaluations

March 18, 2008 – 10:49 pm

I think I’ve mentioned the phenomenon of student evaluations before on this blog. Sometimes, as I’ve explained in the earlier post, I’ve received some very amusing ones. Most have been pretty positive although I have received some critical evaluations. Never anything really soul destroying…yet. Other times, the positive ones balance the negative ones exactly (eg, [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Law, Society | Comments (4)

Surveys and silliness

November 1, 2007 – 9:43 pm

It has been a hectic few weeks. Teaching has ended for the year. As always, I got a corker of a comment in the student feedback surveys. One student said that I should “dress up as a gangsta” and bring my daughter to class as an example of “ginger power”. That made me laugh. I [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Fark!, Personal | Comments (3)

Baby Einstein not so smart

August 9, 2007 – 2:07 pm

I wrote a post a while back on feeling guilty where I spoke about the lack of exposure my child has had to Baby Einstein and educational DVDs. A new study has posited that showing educational DVDs to children has little or no educational benefit, and may actually harm them. So I’ll scrub away that [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Motherhood | Comments (8)

Carrots that eat milk

July 8, 2007 – 6:53 pm

When my sister and I were little, we came up with the sentence which is the title of this post (during a trip to Jenolan Caves). We found it hilarious because it made no sense. Carrots are incapable of eating, and even if they were capable, they couldn’t “eat” milk anyway. Yeah, we were strange [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Drugs, Law, Religion | Comments (12)

Performance anxiety

June 12, 2007 – 9:18 pm

Leon Gettler has a post about performance reviews on The Age blog. It struck a chord. I’m not the greatest fan of performance reviews. I don’t think I’ve ever had one which has been helpful. Most of the time, they have been “rubber stamp” affairs, with bosses ticking various boxes just so that we can [...]

By Legal Eagle | Comments (4)

Quick post on hijabs

June 6, 2007 – 6:48 pm

I read today that legislation banning teachers from wearing a hijab in class passed by the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia has been upheld as legal. Obviously I can’t comment on the nature of the decision (I don’t know much about German law). But I do think that it represents a disturbing trend of intolerance.
What [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Law, Religion, Society | Comments (21)