Harp
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 8,508
- Location
- Chicago, IL US
I remember realising with some horror that my undergraduates were exactly half my age. And that was in the Before Times, five, nearly six, years ago. I no longer even need to ask to ascertain that none of them remember dial-up internet. Increasingly few of them seem to particularly remember a PM pre-Cameron, which puts a real time-frame on it. When I mention developments in law which happened under the Major government and cases like Aitken and Hamilton, it's like ancient history to them. In pop culture terms, Nirvana's Nevermind LP (1991) was longer ago relative to their lifetime than are the Beatles to me. The real kicker was working out that for them 80s rock and roll revivalists like Brian Setzer fall in their relative timeline at the same point as does Elvis for me. Which might explain why they all find it so hilarious when on occasion I'm actually up to date with popular culture. My being a fan of Ru Paul's Drag Race has caused much mirth on many occasions.
Grad proctor days, tutorial sessions, distant memories.... I didn't start college until
I was twenty one; however a few years before I began to realize that there was more
to life than baseball and girls. Thrown into circumstances unlike most with older men
whom had inner lives, highly read, wise to life and the world. And they had what I wanted,
the life of the mind, wisdom; known truths tested in furnace, refined. University offered
the most difficult with the most demanding instruction. And as grad teaching showed
age is often mercurial, I felt decades older than undergrads. They lacked passionate
thirst, their curiosity all too easily and quickly slaked. And their papers God awful, mostly
slipshod. They had read, perhaps skimmed... but they did not know literature. Philosophy.
Grammar, structure, objective factual analysis. I recall telling one young man he
needed to sleep with Lady Philosophy inside a prison cell awaiting execution.
Reference Boethius and his epistle, all of which stupefied him entirely.
Frustrating in the extreme, humorous in retrospect....
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David Mellinkoff's casebook The Conscience of A Lawyer details Courvoisier
and subsequent chastening of Charles Phillips, Irish silk and patron saint of Chicago lawyers.
The text offers underaduate aspirants to the Bar much food for thought and would serve splendid
foundation Hilary or Trinity class.
I envy your faculty post professor.
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