pmbr: day 4
torts...
in contrast with my 1l experience with property, i was inexplicably bad at torts. i read more than i read for every other class (which isn't to say i read religiously, but you know, there were some highlights in my torts book at least), i poured over the outlines (of course our professor gave everyone the same outline to work from), i studied the supplements, i worked practice exams, i just couldn't make headway in that class. i honestly think i got hung up by my more literary tendencies. my need to proofread sentences to make sure they made sense, to spell check, not at the end, but after i put down a word i was unsure of, to internally debate the need for commas (when in doubt, i put a comma, in case you hadn't noticed). because i was thinking more about how i was writing, i don't think i was thinking enough about how much i was writing. talking with classmates after my final, i realized that my answers were, in total, 300-500 words shorter. torts was a racehorse exam and i spent too much time grooming a donkey.
flash forward to today. we had a new, considerably more fascist, instructor today. our instructor for the first three days had been lighthearted, corny, but well-intentioned. he spent what felt like too much time, at the time, joking about anything, from drugs, to law professors, to sex, anything to get a rise out of us. but he had a way of distilling his advice into essential nuggets that didn't go unnoticed. he gave us specific strategies that, at least now, seem very helpful.
our new guy just flies through the material (maybe it's just torts, maybe there's so much in torts that teaching it by sprinting through a distilled outline is the only way to get through it all, but i get the feeling the next two days are going to have a very similar feel). he doesn't pause for moments of levity, he barely pauses for bathroom breaks, he's a machine. the first three days, the reviews left me more confident, more excited, more curious than i was before the review, but today, the review just exhausted me. trying to keep up with this guy was like trying to be a stenographer at an auction. you had to listen intently, but not forget what your fingers were doing (typing what he said 2-5 minutes ago).
he had some good strategies, but when he moved away from outlining tort law and reviewing the questions we'd done in the morning, it felt more like a mental vacation than time to cue in to what was really important. here what is important is not the substance but the process of studying for and taking the bar exam. we'll get beaten about the head for the next two months with substance. this short workshop should be about test-studying and test-taking strategies so that we can get the most out of the rest of our time to study.
i was pleasantly surprised by my 48%. i had honestly anticipated something in the 25-35% range. torts still baffles me. not because it's so complicated (which it is), but because all the different causes of action are so similar, all the various tests use overlapping vocabularies, everything in torts is related to something else in torts and i get lost in the web most times, and pick out bits of vocabulary that have nothing to do with the proper cause of action.
the only real excitement of the afternoon, other than a lunch conversation about lost, in which i was completely... lost (that's one of those jokes you wish you could stop yourself from making, but it's just too easy to be resisted), was nearly getting hit by a pickup truck on my bike ride to the train station. it wasn't really that close, he just made a stupid maneuver to cut me off as we both approached a red light.
i thought briefly about throwing a water bottle at him in retaliation, but then realized that with the bottle tucked in my backpack (no bottle cages on my commuter bike), i would probably wind up throwing myself under his wheel before i managed to unholster my plastic projectile. i settled on a dirty look as i cut back around him while he waited at the red light, then another dirty look (which he avoided) as he repassed me once we got rolling again.
there's nothing like the fear of iminent death to make you simultaneously afraid of everything and afraid of nothing. while i was absolutely petrified by the thought of getting hit by that pickup, i somehow thought it was a good idea to display my anger at him through a brief staredown. as if the sight of me, atop my crappy 9-year old costco bike glaring at him like a hockey enforcer (which is a joke, i own a mirror, i know my 'tough face' is the rough equivalent of president bush trying to act literate) was going to quell his impulse to get to his destination, my safety be damned. no, he probably avoided my second glare out of courtesy, realizing it was just mean to laugh at me to my face when he knew full well that someone as boyish-looking as me would probably stand less of a chance hand-to-hand than pickup-to-bike.
in contrast with my 1l experience with property, i was inexplicably bad at torts. i read more than i read for every other class (which isn't to say i read religiously, but you know, there were some highlights in my torts book at least), i poured over the outlines (of course our professor gave everyone the same outline to work from), i studied the supplements, i worked practice exams, i just couldn't make headway in that class. i honestly think i got hung up by my more literary tendencies. my need to proofread sentences to make sure they made sense, to spell check, not at the end, but after i put down a word i was unsure of, to internally debate the need for commas (when in doubt, i put a comma, in case you hadn't noticed). because i was thinking more about how i was writing, i don't think i was thinking enough about how much i was writing. talking with classmates after my final, i realized that my answers were, in total, 300-500 words shorter. torts was a racehorse exam and i spent too much time grooming a donkey.
flash forward to today. we had a new, considerably more fascist, instructor today. our instructor for the first three days had been lighthearted, corny, but well-intentioned. he spent what felt like too much time, at the time, joking about anything, from drugs, to law professors, to sex, anything to get a rise out of us. but he had a way of distilling his advice into essential nuggets that didn't go unnoticed. he gave us specific strategies that, at least now, seem very helpful.
our new guy just flies through the material (maybe it's just torts, maybe there's so much in torts that teaching it by sprinting through a distilled outline is the only way to get through it all, but i get the feeling the next two days are going to have a very similar feel). he doesn't pause for moments of levity, he barely pauses for bathroom breaks, he's a machine. the first three days, the reviews left me more confident, more excited, more curious than i was before the review, but today, the review just exhausted me. trying to keep up with this guy was like trying to be a stenographer at an auction. you had to listen intently, but not forget what your fingers were doing (typing what he said 2-5 minutes ago).
he had some good strategies, but when he moved away from outlining tort law and reviewing the questions we'd done in the morning, it felt more like a mental vacation than time to cue in to what was really important. here what is important is not the substance but the process of studying for and taking the bar exam. we'll get beaten about the head for the next two months with substance. this short workshop should be about test-studying and test-taking strategies so that we can get the most out of the rest of our time to study.
i was pleasantly surprised by my 48%. i had honestly anticipated something in the 25-35% range. torts still baffles me. not because it's so complicated (which it is), but because all the different causes of action are so similar, all the various tests use overlapping vocabularies, everything in torts is related to something else in torts and i get lost in the web most times, and pick out bits of vocabulary that have nothing to do with the proper cause of action.
the only real excitement of the afternoon, other than a lunch conversation about lost, in which i was completely... lost (that's one of those jokes you wish you could stop yourself from making, but it's just too easy to be resisted), was nearly getting hit by a pickup truck on my bike ride to the train station. it wasn't really that close, he just made a stupid maneuver to cut me off as we both approached a red light.
i thought briefly about throwing a water bottle at him in retaliation, but then realized that with the bottle tucked in my backpack (no bottle cages on my commuter bike), i would probably wind up throwing myself under his wheel before i managed to unholster my plastic projectile. i settled on a dirty look as i cut back around him while he waited at the red light, then another dirty look (which he avoided) as he repassed me once we got rolling again.
there's nothing like the fear of iminent death to make you simultaneously afraid of everything and afraid of nothing. while i was absolutely petrified by the thought of getting hit by that pickup, i somehow thought it was a good idea to display my anger at him through a brief staredown. as if the sight of me, atop my crappy 9-year old costco bike glaring at him like a hockey enforcer (which is a joke, i own a mirror, i know my 'tough face' is the rough equivalent of president bush trying to act literate) was going to quell his impulse to get to his destination, my safety be damned. no, he probably avoided my second glare out of courtesy, realizing it was just mean to laugh at me to my face when he knew full well that someone as boyish-looking as me would probably stand less of a chance hand-to-hand than pickup-to-bike.
posted by tobin at 5/25/2006 09:14:00 PM
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