I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing.

Introduction

When I am sitting on my lime green yoga mat in the

In July 2016, I moved my family—my husband, my two daughters (both toddlers), my two grouchy cats, and me—from Miami to Brooklyn. This move and its challenges have informed my teaching in small, but significant, ways ever since.

“It’s in the syllabus!”

I can’t even remember the number of times I’ve wanted to shout those words at my computer screen when reading an email from a student asking what my late assignment policy is or when an assignment is due. The seemingly endless stream of reply emails telling students to “please see the syllabus” ate away at my time to do other important tasks and caused me needless frustration.

An Idea Is Born

I felt stupid.

Sitting in a small classroom, with classmates I’d just met, avoiding eye contact with a teacher I couldn’t understand, I felt stupid.

I’d started this venture feeling smart, motivated, and confident. I was eager to master new skills, and my past educational experiences indicated that my hard work would bring success.

But no.

“This is where they got it wrong with ‘this rock’ and ‘that rock.’ It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.” –Keith Richards

According to some experts, 2020 will be the year of the QR code. Remember QR codes? They were interesting for a while but also annoying because you needed an app to scan them.

Dear students:

I hope you experienced productive summers and are enjoying your second year of law school. As you begin submitting law clerk applications for next summer, I encourage you to revisit the memoranda and briefs that you completed in my legal writing class last year. With revision, they would make appropriate writing samples to accompany your applications. I’m sorry that I’m not on campus to help you polish your written work product. I’ve decided to use my sabbatical year to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

On the day of my first graduate creative-writing workshop, my professor walked into class with a stack of papers in hand. All twelve of us grew quiet; the week before, he’d brought a similarly sized stack that had turned out to contain copies of the original first page of a story my classmate had turned in as a revision. My professor had brought the original to show how it was possible to revise the life out of a story, and he methodically worked through the original first page as compared to the new one to make his point.