My religious studies teaching assistant in college wrote on one of my papers something to the effect of, “your thesis here seems to be a both/and approach.” I never forgot the feedback for two reasons: (1) that teaching assistant was one of my best teachers ever (and no one should be surprised she’s now an amazing tenured professor) and (2) it was validation that not every normative or analytical assessment needed to be an either/or proposition.
Bringing that concept of both/and to this current moment in the yearly cycle of an ASPer is … tricky.
It certainly is not what many of us are teaching to our February bar takers in MBE world. After all, effective binary thinking is key to better scoring in a 1.8 minute game played 200 times over the course of 6 (or 9, or 12) hours. Our students must hone the ability to pick the right fork from “this or that,” determine whether element X is “met or not met,” or at least feel more confident during their infamous down-to-two conundrum. Majority black-letter law, and proper psychometric design requires the bar examiners to create a lineal space where we must choose between A or B: “A is right, and B is wrong.”[1]
And it certainly makes things difficult as we progress from processing the care and (sometimes) feeding of students who have received bad first semester grades to guiding them towards plans of action. We urge them – correctly – that their first set of finals do not define them as people, or as lawyers, and that many of us also dealt with that same challenge.[2] We remind them – correctly – that competence is not fixed, but growable and malleable, a habit that will serve them swell as the look towards the future of their legal education, their bar exam, and beyond.[3] We now actually have some semblance of longitudinal research that truly shows that it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.[4]
Still, you were looking for a “boundaries take,” so here it is.
Both: all of that stuff can be true.
and …
So can the fact that you designed an impactful, thoughtful caring, powered-by-learning science-data-and-your-legions-of-adoring-2L/3L/4L-fans suite of optional and/or required programming for these students last summer and last fall. You offered these students many opportunities to come to these programs, seek out extra help, book meetings with you, and build learning relationships with both you and (for those of us fortunate to have them) your stellar corps of student educators. You bought lots of candy for then[5], and pre-bought lots of tissues for now. You partnered with other front-facing offices and inspiring doctrinal and legal writing faculty colleagues to create a welcoming environment.
and …
Many of those students who did not have great news took little, if any advantage of all that you did. And many of their peers who did? They received decidedly better news. And those students must – of course without undue stigma or shame – appreciate that their chosen profession demands accountability, and that their clients, courts, and counterparts on the other side of the bench deserve the same. Especially, well … now, in America v.2026.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine what more an ASPer could have done. So, I guess that’s the boundary take in today’s post. We always benefit from a thoughtful review of our programs to make sure we improve systems and service.[6] Yet we cannot let that become an oversimplified, endless lament over what we, or others[7], might mis-frame as a choice we did not make, a follow-up e-mail we did not send, a practice exam we did not evaluate, or an extra mile we did not walk during a graveyard shift, non-mandatory working weekend, night without sleep caring for our young children or older family members,[8] and/or crunch season moonlighting to fill the gaps left by our systemic under-compensation.[9] It is true that this moment both provides an important moment for teaching reflection, accountability, action planning, and self-regulated learning[10] to our students, and it should not dampen our continuing resolve to help our students, our institutions, and ourselves understand why they were not engaged.[11]
This is an important reminder for all of us to carry into February. After all, this is the month where many of the best-laid New Year’s plans meet their end. It’s also the month your local gym both becomes yours again and makes a hefty windfall margin off of the new signups who lose momentum and forget to cancel their freshly inked memberships.[12] It is a month for you both to reclaim your boundaries as an amazing educator and spur growth and intentional action in you and those around you. My hope is these words arrive just in time for the end of your winter bar push this month, and the well-deserved Spring Break hopefully awaiting you and those around you next month.[13]
(Shane Dizon)
[1] Or A and B are both correct, but A is the best. Or maybe they’re coming back around to both/and too with those new NextGen six-answer multiple choice queries?
[2] My NYLS colleague Heidi Brown’s post on the ABA website should be required reading for any of your 1Ls shaken up by their first-semester performance. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_students/resources/student-lawyer/student-essentials/law-school-grades-are-not-your-story
[3] I’m certainly not the first person on this blog to talk about this, and not nearly the most persuasive or most impressive one to do so. For example, seethe great Melissa Hale’s post on this topic here https://lawschoolaspblog.com/the-importance-of-growth-and-grit
[4] The AccessLex and Law School Study of Student Engagement teams’ watershed study could stand to be in a few of our deans’ mailboxes, on a recurring basis, every bar results season. Especially the part about “how graduates who felt that their law school experience contributed ‘very much’ to their skills development” contributes to bar passage. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827402
[5] I’m not sure if my exploiting of CVS discount coupons and post-Halloween clearance sales counts as fiscal responsibility or fusion-nerd obsession with getting to currently flex math and gastronomy muscles as a distraction from explaining Erie. Hey, both/and, amirite?
[6] As my amazing fellow Contributing Editor points out, it’s not the worst thing in the world to have an emotionless-but-ruthlessly-effective Ctrl-F engine on steroids do some of that for you. https://lawschoolaspblog.com/is-this-working-using-ai-to-evaluate-your-evals.
[7] A discussion best had over adult beverages. Both at the AASE conference this May … and maybe elsewhere? See note 13, infra.
[8] Another of my amazing fellow Contributing Editors has just spelled out for all of us how full this plate can get. https://lawschoolaspblog.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-academic-support-professional
[9] I can both encourage you to advocate for this issue … and promote reaching out to me, and the AASE Assessment Committee – for these reports. #bothand
[10] I’m not sure if we call such things “classics,” or “vintage”, or “throwback” these days. But this core concept in ASP, from one of our living legends, certainly qualifies as it. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1308&context=facultyarticles
[11] Some of our best adages, in fact, draw from insights not unique to law school: they didn’t know what they didn’t know (one I adapted from a veterans’ law group panel at a previous school); they have been systemically under-resourced for the better parts of their personal, educational, and professional lives (a consensus finding in higher education); they struggled to adapt to law school’s deceptively challenging social scene (still won’t forget psychological safety’s glow-up moment in Google’s comprehensive study on the matter with its work teams; they both have no one to turn to their in their family or their circle who has been to college or law school and are that person to whom their family or circle turns for that exact same reason (there’s more to just saying one’s school wants to and does enroll first-generation students).
[12] I don’t even have the market concerned on recent analogies to cardio-like endeavors from Contributing Editors. https://lawschoolaspblog.com/in-the-dark
[13] Okay, friends. Someone’s gotta be the first fellow ASPer to visit. You do know there’s a gigantic party dedicated to blowing stuff up and setting things on fire in the Valencian Community every March, right? https://www.visitvalencia.com/en/events-valencia/festivities/the-fallas
