What's Too Much Information for Students? Guest Post by Lisa McElroy
Last week,
reading Mike and Neil’s posts about their memories of 9/11, I
thought a lot about whether I should blog about my own. At first, I decided not
to, because the official story, the one my students know about how I
experienced that day, is likely quite similar to the stories of many other law
professors – and frankly not all that interesting.
I had to
tell my students that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
had occurred. I was in my car when I
heard, driving the eighty miles from my home north of Boston to my job at Roger
Williams Law School in southern Rhode Island, listening to NPR and drinking my
coffee. I was about half an hour from
school when the news of the first plane hit the airwaves; I was just pulling
into the parking lot when the anchor announced that America was under attack,
as evidenced by the impact of the second plane.
I walked into school through the basement cafeteria and stopped to watch
the television footage on the large flat screen on the wall. It was crowded. People were crying.
But then I
had to get to my 10:00 class. And, as is
the way for so many young adults, several of my students showed up a few
minutes before I was scheduled to begin going over IRAC, having just rolled out
of bed. They hadn’t turned on the news,
and many of them still didn’t have cell phones at the beginning of 2001. It was my job to tell them what had
happened. We never got to IRAC.
But that
night, I went home to my family. And
that was when my real 9/11 story began.
I missed
several days of work nine weeks later, in mid-November, just before my
students’ memos were due and I was scheduled to be conferencing with them. I told my students that I was ill, that I had
been in the emergency room and was now on doctor-ordered bed rest, but I didn’t
tell them what had happened. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, I got emails from several of them asking whether there was any
chance we could have our conference anyway, telling me that they were too
anxious about the memo to reschedule.
And also unsurprisingly, I was pretty upset when I got these emails – I
viewed these students as insensitive and self-centered. But, looking back, I wonder if my feelings
were justified; after all, I hadn’t told them the full story.
Five years
after the 9/11 attacks, I
wrote about my “real” 9/11 story in Parenting
magazine (a
mainstream print publication aimed at mothers of young children), but I had
several reasons for choosing not to share the difficulties I experienced that
day and that fall with my students.
The biggest
reason? I didn’t tell my students what
was going on with me during that fall of 2001 because I thought I shouldn’t,
because I thought that professionalism required me to maintain some kind of
boundaries, because I thought that my personal life wasn’t relevant to my
students’ legal education. It wasn’t
that I felt I needed privacy; it was that I felt that it would be inappropriate
to burden my students with my problems.
As the years
have passed, I’ve reflected a lot on the events that occurred in my family’s
life around 9/11, but I’ve also had a lot of opportunity to reflect on my
teaching style, as well as on commonly held views about what makes for good
teaching. And so this post isn’t really
about what happened to me in the weeks following 9/11, but about how I should
have processed and communicated my feelings about those events.
At least one
legal scholar has offered her own thoughts, at least in considering the
relationship between clinical professors and students. Kathleen Sullivan (the late Yale Law School clinician, not the former Dean of Stanford Law School of the same name) commented in an article
almost twenty years ago, “Perhaps it is because of the simultaneous need for
distance in teacher-student interaction, that defining the parameters of
[non-sexual] intimacy clinical teacher[s] and students may share is such a
complicated task. For example, self-disclosure
can be an important pedagogical tool for the clinical teacher, but so is
withholding disclosure. There are times
when the teacher should not share her experience, but listen for that of the
student.”[1]
For the
professor making the decision about what to disclose, law school hierarchy
matters. Part of my confusion about what
to disclose to students about my own life stems from the fact that they are
adults, not children. While
psychologists have studied undergraduates’ opinions about professors who
self-disclose (as the literature calls it), few, if any, have looked at how
adult learners like law students perceive the issue. On the one hand, our students are not kids;
they know that bad things happen to everyone, including their teachers. On the other hand, as Sullivan notes in her
article, we professors are still steering the ship, even if we do not endorse
the “sage on the stage” approach to teaching.
Does that power dynamic dictate some sort of professional distance?
Context
matters, too. Psychologists have looked
at (and Sullivan commented on) how and when disclosures take place. As Sullivan noted, sharing baby pictures with
her clinical students over coffee is probably different from passing them around
a large lecture class. One-on-one meetings
with students might be more “intimate” (as Sullivan uses the word) than class
settings.
And, of
course, content matters. Among the
professor friends I’ve asked, those who share about their personal lives don’t
tell students about the big personal stuff, or at least not the big stuff that’s
happening now. But one professor I know
tells her 1L class each October or
November that she hopes they have good support systems and encourages them to
seek professional help if they need it, as so many law students find they do –
she should know, she explains, because she was diagnosed with depression in law
school. Another professor frequently
uses photos of her kids in PowerPoints to illustrate legal concepts. Still another draws on her interest in fitness
and adventure racing to inspire her students to “work out” their minds. And these three professors are some of the
most dynamic (and most respected by students) I know.
Me? I tend to straddle the line. As a young woman who’s balancing career and
family, I choose to be pretty transparent about the I Don’t Know How She Does It nature of my life (and that of any law
professor who’s trying to parent and publish).
If I have to reschedule a class so I can take a kid with the chicken pox
into the pediatrician, I tell my students.
Last year, when three colleagues and I went to a Lady Gaga concert, I
shared. When I lost 30 pounds one summer
on Weight Watchers, I let that information drop (in the context of “Boy, do I
know what it’s like to do something really hard.”). I have no issue telling students that I cheer
for the Red Sox and follow the Supreme Court religiously.
But I’ve
never told my students when I’ve had a fight with my husband or when my
daughters have experienced conflict relating to the joys of entering
adolescence. I didn’t mention the
unbecoming-to-a-law-professor miniskirt and sequined top I wore to the Lady
Gaga concert. And, no, I didn’t tell the
students that the reason I had postponed their conferences was because I had a
miscarriage and needed emergency surgery.
Should I have? According to
Sullivan, no. At least in 1993, she
thought, “[A]ssuming the value of self-disclosure as a pedagogical tool, there
are limits on the kinds of information that one shares with one’s
students. One does not, for example, tell one’s students about one’s miscarriages
. . .”[2]
What’s the
right level of self-revelation for law professors? Where do we draw the line? When do we help students bond – and therefore
learn – when we share information about ourselves? And when do we hamper learning and become –
let’s just say it – annoying and unprofessional? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.