Legal Commentary

A couple random teaching-related thoughts.

First, take a look at two posts from Jacqueline Lipton (and the Comments) at Faculty Lounge on evaluating faculty on both teaching and scholarship.

Second, in my upper-level electives (Fed Courts and Civil Rights), I use a paper/essay exam hybrid the primary evaluation--students choose one topic from a list ("What's the worst doctrine?" or explain the significance of a quotation or comment n the constitutionality of some proposed legislation) and write an essay tied to the doctrine, theory, and ideas covered in the course. For no particular reason, I started thinking today about doing a question in which students would get a one-frame cartoon (The New Yorker would be the obvious source, but we could find them from other sources) and have the student relate that cartoon to the material in the course. My wife had an exam that did this in a sociology course and it sounds like a fun idea (although she said it was the hardest exam she had in college).

Could this work? And does anyone have ideas on cartoon(s) to use?