Great Things

I just blurted it out in class yesterday, not quite knowing what I was saying: "To do great things you must do great things."  You see, I think many of us - me especially - think that I can do great things without really doing great things.  That they just sort of happen, so to speak.  That blurt got me musing about legal education.

Take bar prep. Preparing for the bar exam takes great effort.  But it takes more than effort. It takes focusing attention, work, and learning on those activities that are most optimal for growth and leaving behind those activities that merely feel like learning but are not. And, it takes relying on others who have gone before us, for materials, lessons learned, and advice.

Take law school. Many of us - at least for me when I was in law school - checked all the boxes but didn't really understand what I was doing nor even why.  Great education leaves us changed for the better.  It doesn't settle in like a comfortable pillow.  Rather, a remarkable educational experience challenges us, makes us uncomfortable about what we think we know because, the more we learn, the more we come to know that we have so much more to learn.  As my mom used to tell me in response to what she suggested I teach my students, she said to "teach them to see things from the other persons' shoes." Sound advice but not necessarily easy to do.

Take academic support and bar passage programs.  For many institutions, ASP and bar passage work is compartmentalized.  It's something of a side show.  A box checked, or, as recent post described it, non-contextualized.  That's like trying to build something great without demanding something out of all of us.

One of my colleagues suggested to me that our role as legal educators should focus on three objectives:

• Developing professionally competent attorneys.
• Preparing our students to successfully pass bar exams.
• Ensuring that our students have meaningful employment in their chosen fields.

If we do those three things well, in community with each other and our students, we will have done great things...together.  But, that takes the entire community cooperatively engaged in great things, little or big, to ensure that the great things happen for our students.  It's a big job for all of us but it's a job that ought not be on the shoulders of solely any of us because we all have a role to play regardless of our job titles, program responsibilities, or rank. 

That's something that plays out in military aviation.  The pilots, so to speak, are the faces of aviation. But the planes don't fly without all of the other participants fully committed and fully engaged, fueling the airplanes, maintaining the airplanes, paving the runways, controlling the skies, etc.

There's a saying that comes to mind. There are no solo pilots, even in military jets.  We all fly together or we don't fly at all. Let's fly together so that we can fly higher than ever.  (Scott Johns).