Professor Norton L. Steuben
Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor Emeritus
School of Law
University of Colorado Boulder
I retired from the University effective June 30, 2002. While I will be teaching one class in the spring semester, and I will “mentor” any of our new faculty here at the Law School who desire some advice and mentoring, I am really not in a position to implement a Teaching Scholars’ project at this time. On the other hand, for the last three or four years I have experimented with using a computer in my tax classes. In order to focus the classes’ attention on the particular provision of the Internal Revenue Code with which we are dealing, I have “loaded” the Internal Revenue Code on the hard drive of a computer and then projected the relevant Internal Revenue Code section on the screen at the front of the room. Having the relevant Code section projected on the screen allowed me to “literally” point out the wording in the Code section that affected the analysis that I and the class were working with.
I found that the experiment had a couple of positive results. First, it focused the entire class’s attention on the particular Internal Revenue Code section being discussed. Second, it gave me the opportunity to literally underline the words that might control the analysis with which the class and I were dealing. The major disadvantage of this experiment was that there was a lot of class down time while I was getting the appropriate Internal Revenue Code section projected on the screen. All in all, I think the experiment was positive and I probably will use this technique when I teach in the spring.