Day 35: An Invitation to a Permanent Work in Progress
I started this blog on July 1, with the goal of posting every day for the next year.
Austin Kleon made me do it.
Well, sort of. In his book Show Your Work, Kleon - a writer and artist - advocates posting a little slice of your work every day.
Gone are the days, he argues, when the artist works entirely in secret, magically unveiling the finished product as audiences (or readers) gape and applaud at the genius that arrives whole cloth.
The internet world changed all that.
Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
Instead, the artist (and the writer) labors publicly. Audiences don’t want to see your unvarnished genius. They expect to see glimpses of the work as it develops.
This makes sense to me - not only as a feature of the InstaGram age, where supermodels post photos of “this-is-me-before-makeup” on the daily.
It makes sense as a more real reflection of human nature.
One of my Facebook friends has this quote (attributed to writer Shauna Niequist) as his cover photo:
“People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd.”
Let’s put it out there: Law professors aren’t exactly known for “love and character and creativity and soul.”
But I think that’s because we’ve been doing a bad job of showing who we really are and what we really care about.
Face it, most of us were already out of law school by the time InstaGram came out. We were raised in the 20th century marketplace: Don’t show your stuff until it’s perfect.
And judges certainly don’t want to see your rough draft, no matter how much “character” you think it has. Sometimes you just gotta get it right.
But not always. Like the quote above suggests, sometimes it’s much more about letting people know you care. Letting them know you’re listening. Letting them know you’re still figuring it out too.
As a law professor, I spend lots of days just trying to figure it out. Trying to understand why law students are feeling so much stress. Trying to figure out how we can change law school so it doesn’t have to be that way. Trying to figure out what I should teach law students who will practice in a market that AI will transform from the one I’ve known. Trying to figure out how to provide great representation to our clients in the immigration clinic while the administration (whichever) keeps changing the law every 30 seconds. Trying to figure out how to take law students through the conscious steps of being a good advocate when there are court deadlines that have to be met. Trying to understand the values of communities who feel like immigration is unwelcome, and trying to understand what to do with that. Trying to dig deeper into the history of immigration to figure out how it all got so crazy in the first place, and how we should feel about it today.
Being a professor gives me a seat from which to learn some fascinating things about how the law and society work (or don’t). But it doesn’t arrive as one cohesive picture, but in little slices and slivers that I try to piece together, day by day.
My goal in this blog is to share what I’m seeing with everyone - not just a few people in my classroom or on my hallway or at my academic conference. I don’t have it all figured out, but of one thing I’m convinced: For universities to remain relevant while so much information and education happens in virtual communities, we need to be transparent. We need to share what we’re learning as we go, show our incompleteness, and welcome others - in all our communities, physical and virtual - to come in, take off their shoes, stay a while, and share in this thing we’re all figuring out, one piece at a time.