It is a sprint and a hobble to the finish and the ultimate question on everyone's minds: will the quarter run out before the compounded effects spring fever, law school burn out, AND senioritis utterly and permanently dismantle the final dregs of *caring* to which I am so fervently but ambivalently clinging???? Taking bets now (I have pretty heavy odds against myself and a few wagers to match).
The real problem here is that while I do in fact need to pass all my classes to graduate (high on my list of priorities), ultimately, the degree to which I exceed passing is of marginal import. I have a job lined up. People don't tend to look at GPAs when hiring experienced attorneys. There are no special prizes to be won from doing well.
Logically: no reason to try to do well.
Emotionally, this is a little conflicting, because I like to do well.
But the bigger reason against throwing my hands up and taking some low-scoring lumps in exchange for a modicum of sanity and free time is that if I don't have that last motivation to push myself, my reserve of caring will likely discharge all over the bathroom floor and I will be done. And done is a scary place to be, because done before you're done makes the not being done part so incredibly much more agonizing to bear. So I am waffling over how much I think I care and how much of that "caring" I need to exert, what reserves I have for those crucial final weeks, and how much my reserves of "caring" are likely to effect my "caring" for the much more important bar exam lead up. Complicated flow charts to follow, I am sure.
Over all, I have a small, but fighting chance of beating the burnout. My medical products liability class is... ok, the biggest thing about this class is that it is three students. There were four, but one dropped, intimidated by the intimacy I guess. Oh and one of these students speaks virtually no English, so it's two. It's also graded largely on a paper, so essentially I am doing an independent study class and paper on a topic that nicely marries future bar exam issues with my experience working at the prosecutor's office... all good.
My Civ Pro II class is surprisingly interesting and led by a lovely woman with a soothing but engaging manner and the style sense to wear purple plaid with a pink sweater (keeps me awake as the coffee wears off). I personally have always liked Civ Pro, although having started with Schnapper, my version of the basics may be a bit mystifying and manic.
My Secured Transactions Class has added a mid-morning coffee requirement to my existence as it hits at exactly halfway through the four hour block of classes. I'd guess this is not merely the burn-out tingles, but also due to a simultaneously lulling and dull presentation of an already dry area of law. A note to would-be teachers: if you are going to conduct class by reading rapidly through the book, you probably should adopt the strategies that preschool teachers employ in reading-from-books and make sure to work in some funny voices and changes in pitch and tenor (sparklies are always welcome). It's rare for me to have coffee as a compulsory instead of a leisure beverage until finals week, but on the other hand, I hear coffee is super healthy these days so I am simultaneously staying awake AND staving off stroke, heart attack, and possibly Parkinson's. Thank you, Secured Transactions, for saving my life!
As for my last class, it is currently Employment Law. I attempted a brief excursion into IP and business law in first registering for the grandly named Bioentrepreneurship and the Law, but thought better of it after my first day of having class straight from 8:30 - 3:30 on day one. And may I preemptively respond to you tut-tutters out there and your jovially condescending chides about "the real world" and "work weeks" and simply point out that a work hour is to a class hour what dog years are to tortoise years. Trust me, I have worked many more than the requisite day in my life and I can assert that NO amount of coffee (red bull, yerba mate, methamphetamines...) could possibly have given even the simulacrum of sentience by about 1:30, which happened to be when this class began.
That said, I will leave you with something job related. I was - judiciously - called out for my creative spelling of Wednesday in a convening document (I think Wednesaday really adds a certain creative flair that goes with my personal sparkle, but to each his own). Now, I will admit to having preferred a simple "noticed a typo, please proof read documents closely, thnx" as the briefness befits my overly enormous sense of pride, but while I was initially set up to feel incensed at the wind up to a long winded email lecture, I was too amused at the final product to sustain it. What I recieved was a copy of the document attached to an email that read:
Yes, that is the end of the email. See, you can't project your embarrassment into feeling incensed with that.
Anyways, the real moral is that I'm just at the starting gate and already staring out of windows into the parking lot when I should be in class. Perhaps fortuitously I managed to contract a nasty spyware program that despite all Andrew's best efforts has the survival capacity of a cockroach and seems to resurrect itself whenever the internet is connected. As such, I've disabled wireless in order to write notes. While I will need to nuke the whole thing and start over (if only I had some of those pesky numbers that let the machine know I'm the registered user and not a pirate - arrrrgh... ah well), but I'm putting it off, because an absolute bar on access to the internet during class hours seems like it might not be such a horrible thing and I doubt I could resist the temptation if I were to simply choose to turn the wireless off for no reason.
Anyways, I am done with class for the week and have only about seven more hours of work between today and tomorrow plus the cavalcade of homework looming over my weekend. And I am happy to begin the countdown once again (slightly abridged because it is a condensed quarter) and so I repeat.
... 7 ...
Over all, I have a small, but fighting chance of beating the burnout. My medical products liability class is... ok, the biggest thing about this class is that it is three students. There were four, but one dropped, intimidated by the intimacy I guess. Oh and one of these students speaks virtually no English, so it's two. It's also graded largely on a paper, so essentially I am doing an independent study class and paper on a topic that nicely marries future bar exam issues with my experience working at the prosecutor's office... all good.
My Civ Pro II class is surprisingly interesting and led by a lovely woman with a soothing but engaging manner and the style sense to wear purple plaid with a pink sweater (keeps me awake as the coffee wears off). I personally have always liked Civ Pro, although having started with Schnapper, my version of the basics may be a bit mystifying and manic.
My Secured Transactions Class has added a mid-morning coffee requirement to my existence as it hits at exactly halfway through the four hour block of classes. I'd guess this is not merely the burn-out tingles, but also due to a simultaneously lulling and dull presentation of an already dry area of law. A note to would-be teachers: if you are going to conduct class by reading rapidly through the book, you probably should adopt the strategies that preschool teachers employ in reading-from-books and make sure to work in some funny voices and changes in pitch and tenor (sparklies are always welcome). It's rare for me to have coffee as a compulsory instead of a leisure beverage until finals week, but on the other hand, I hear coffee is super healthy these days so I am simultaneously staying awake AND staving off stroke, heart attack, and possibly Parkinson's. Thank you, Secured Transactions, for saving my life!
As for my last class, it is currently Employment Law. I attempted a brief excursion into IP and business law in first registering for the grandly named Bioentrepreneurship and the Law, but thought better of it after my first day of having class straight from 8:30 - 3:30 on day one. And may I preemptively respond to you tut-tutters out there and your jovially condescending chides about "the real world" and "work weeks" and simply point out that a work hour is to a class hour what dog years are to tortoise years. Trust me, I have worked many more than the requisite day in my life and I can assert that NO amount of coffee (red bull, yerba mate, methamphetamines...) could possibly have given even the simulacrum of sentience by about 1:30, which happened to be when this class began.
That said, I will leave you with something job related. I was - judiciously - called out for my creative spelling of Wednesday in a convening document (I think Wednesaday really adds a certain creative flair that goes with my personal sparkle, but to each his own). Now, I will admit to having preferred a simple "noticed a typo, please proof read documents closely, thnx" as the briefness befits my overly enormous sense of pride, but while I was initially set up to feel incensed at the wind up to a long winded email lecture, I was too amused at the final product to sustain it. What I recieved was a copy of the document attached to an email that read:
Hi Adella:
There is a typo in the attached letter. Is it the end of the world? Hardly.
Errors like that, however, can create a poor first impression of the organization. What I was told in my law firm is that our product is what we write, and what we write must be of the highest quality possible. It was a lesson that
Yes, that is the end of the email. See, you can't project your embarrassment into feeling incensed with that.
Anyways, the real moral is that I'm just at the starting gate and already staring out of windows into the parking lot when I should be in class. Perhaps fortuitously I managed to contract a nasty spyware program that despite all Andrew's best efforts has the survival capacity of a cockroach and seems to resurrect itself whenever the internet is connected. As such, I've disabled wireless in order to write notes. While I will need to nuke the whole thing and start over (if only I had some of those pesky numbers that let the machine know I'm the registered user and not a pirate - arrrrgh... ah well), but I'm putting it off, because an absolute bar on access to the internet during class hours seems like it might not be such a horrible thing and I doubt I could resist the temptation if I were to simply choose to turn the wireless off for no reason.
Anyways, I am done with class for the week and have only about seven more hours of work between today and tomorrow plus the cavalcade of homework looming over my weekend. And I am happy to begin the countdown once again (slightly abridged because it is a condensed quarter) and so I repeat.
... 7 ...
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