Do what you can, when you can
Well, Christmas is safely packed away in the loft. According to my fitness watch I both finished 2025 and started 2026 strong. Actually, I did no such thing. I finished work on the 19th December, I had a pretty quiet time but it has really taken me until now to feel even remotely rested. I finished 2025 slowly recovering from exhaustion and being at capacity for too long. The first day of 2026 has been the same. With Christmas decorations taken down, the house returned to its normal, though not yet fully cleaned, state, my thoughts turned to going back to work. I go back tomorrow, I suspect many academic friends and colleagues will go back on Monday.
Anyway, I think almost every year I have done some work over the Christmas period. I thought I would this time. I have some writing projects to progress, stuff to do that is nice, fun. though still work. But I didn’t. I didn’t log on at all. I didn’t read anything work related, I didn’t write anything work related and I haven’t really thought about it much at all. Until today. Because now suddenly it feels like I need a plan for tomorrow and that means knowing what needs doing urgently… and so I nearly logged on. And then I gave myself a good telling off that may have included some swear words and ‘idiot’.
Starting back after the break on a Friday is actually perfect. Tomorrow I make the plan, I get things in order and ready for Monday. Preparation for work is work. It can be done in work time. And of course I forgot the key thing, the thing that I try as much as I can to stress to colleagues, PhD students and anyone who will listen really: Nothing in our job is ever actually urgent. Nobody is standing by us bleeding from a major artery, nothing is literally on fire, nobody is in immediate danger. I deal in words on pages, arbitrary deadlines, reports nobody reads… I am not saying that what I do as an academic isn’t important – some of it is – but we put the urgency into the work we do. The work is not inherently urgent. In fact I think that maybe the work would be better if we took any urgency out of it. If we properly slowed down. We need to keep reminding ourselves and each other of that.
Anyway, I have already rambled more than I intended to! I really just wanted to post to wish you a calm, peaceful, creative and kind 2026. I know that in an academic world that is in such a mess, that wish might seem out of reach, ridiculous even, but we have to try. There is hope, there are amazing people working in universities doing amazing things in spite of the conditions we have to survive in. There are people who are actively trying to improve those conditions – on large scales or through tiny acts of solidarity and resistance. Higher Education has lost its way, that doesn’t mean all those within it have. Resistance is exhausting, it takes its toll, demands a price.. whatever cliche you want to throw at it. So this is a sort of rallying cry but it is one that I have been thinking since I used the phrase in a post for my running blog earlier today: Do what you can, when you can. If we all do what we can, when we can to reclaim at least some of what Higher Education can be, maybe we can make some progress and maybe more of us can return to really enjoying our work more of the time.
Happy New year from me and my furry mental health team: Storm, Kilian, Odin and Einstein. Take care of each other.
99 Days of Something – #3 or Society of Legal Scholars Day 1
There was no writing as such do be done today so again the blog is the only writing in my string of writing I am going to do today. Together with the brilliant Dr Kat Langley I convene the Legal Education Subject Section at the Society of Legal Scholars. We had two really good sessions today so here are some of my initial very brief reflections on the contributions.
We started the conference with a brilliant panel of Nick Cartwright, Rita D’Alton-Harrison and Simisayo Olawore on Studying Black in Law School: The intersections of Black Student Life. There was so much in that panel presentation that I am not sure where to start really. We have so much to unpack, think about, challenge if we genuinely want to create inclusive legal education. Hearing from Simisayo about her lived experience as a black female student highlighted really clearly that even when we are trying to be inclusive, our efforts might not be landing how we intend them to. I was thinking about how we get round this issue that presents itself whenever we as experts in a particular field or as educators think that we know what is best or how we can get ideas across. We will always get caught up in the power dynamics of teacher/student that risk silencing some voices, re-enforcing stereotypes or misrepresenting experiences – even with the best of intentions. I think if we genuinely want to tackle this we need to relinquish much more power in the classroom. We need to genuinely listen, co-create, tear down and rebuild our discipline in a way which treats all of our experiences of law as valid and useful starting points for analysis.
In our second session we shifted focus and started with a paper which made me think about how we can use visuals to help us understand and explain complex legal concepts by Tristan Webb. It prompted me to think about how I make sense of complexity. I don’t think I really do visuals. Everything I do is text based in some way. So even my diagrams are text based – more mind map or flow chart than picture. I think in words not in pictures. But that is not helpful for anyone who thinks in pictures rather than in words. So how can I adapt some of my teaching, representations, slides and other materials to help students develop the things, whether its diagrams, pictures, memes, cartoons, objects, whatever it is to help them make sense of the things we are talking about. And seamlessly that linked me to the next presentation about using Lego to help students grapple with contract law doctrine and develop a more nuanced understanding. Marton Ribary and Antony Starza-Allen outlined how they used Lego and a structured series of builds to really get students thinking about the complexities of contract law.
Questions that came up on both of those papers were around how we measure success. How do we know if these things have a tangible impact on student performance. I don’t know the answer to that but I wondered whether we should maybe just stop obsessing about measuring. I wondered if we could just celebrate the fact that students maybe just had fun, that the noise levels in the classroom rose that little bit, that there was more conversation, more laughter, maybe even giggles. Can we just accept that it doesn’t matter if students on average did X% better if they did the thing or used the gimmick or whatever, maybe the increase in the grade is irrelevant. What if what matters is simply that they enjoyed the learning, that they talked to others, collaborated and had fun.
The final paper was a presentation by Dawn Watkins on a game about law for school children and I have more to say on that and no capacity now. It’s time for bed to let me brain do its thing on all of this – more tomorrow
99 Days of Something – #2
Well, 99 days of writing? Yeah. About that. I haven’t written a thing today. I intended to this morning but then I got sidetracked and caught up in emails and admin stuff. Not opening my email first thing is obviously a lesson I need to learn over and over again. And then I forgot about writing. I nearly failed on day 1 of actually trying to string together consecutive days of writing and day 2 of blogging about it.
I went to yoga this evening and as I settled into the mat and focused on just breathing, just being and trying to let go of any judgment or expectation my brain obviously did its thing in the background. As we finished the practice and the teacher asked us to think about what we could do to bring ourselves into balance this evening, I thought about writing and how writing has always brought balance to me. I started keeping a journal from as soon as I could hold a pen and make some vaguely recognisable marks on paper. I wrote stories, I wrote letters to friends all over the world, I dabbled in awful teenage angsty poetry and crafted stories. I wrote almost as much as I read and I devoured books. I still journal in burst but rarely consistently, I have recently started letting my brain do it’s random thing by playing with fiction writing – it’s not for anyone to ever read, I have no plans to turn the snippets of stories into anything coherent – it is just an outlet for the randomness that builds up in my brain.
Writing then for me has never been about productivity. Writing is balance. Writing brings balance. Writing is both a joy in itself and something that can help pull me out of dark places and towards joy. So often now writing feels pressured, it is tied to deadlines and adheres to the confines of academic expectations and norms. And there is some joy in that sort of writing too. I somehow like the challenge and discipline of writing for academic journals, of having to craft an argument in a particular way using appropriate evidence and following academic conventions. Being able to do that is somehow satisfying. But it can also be constraining and I think I am learning that to balance that sort of writing, I also need other sorts of writing. I need to allow space to just play with words, be more fun, more decadent and more outrageous. Writing is not one thing. Sometimes it is just silly, sometimes it is serious and following rules, sometimes it is deeply personal and just mine and often it just is.
So today’s writing is just this blog post, just some thoughts about balance, nothing meaningful, nothing serious, no rules but also no silliness. Maybe just a reminder to us all to think about what brings us into balance. I hadn’t thought about writing in this way before but I think writing is the thing that helps me balance everything else.
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