the lunch nazi
So one of my friends and I were sitting in the atrium at school from about 11-1 earlier today. She remarked that, she brought lunch, but wasn't hungry. So she decided to heat up her lunch at about 1:15 and take it to class with her.
As a much more considerate person that I could ever be, she asked her fellow students if eating her hot tasty lunch in class would be a problem. Since she's not the person whose food smells like burnt hair whenever it's put in the microwave, they all agreed.
The professor comes in, though, and tells her that she is not allowed to eat in class. The reason?
It's against law school rules to eat in class.
Now, you would think that, after two years, one semester, and 13 weeks of law school, we would know if eating in class was against law school rules. After my friend told me this, I went so far as to peruse the law school rules posted on the law school's website. And wouldn't you know, there's absolutely NOTHING about the consumption of food in class being verboten.
I understand that it's the professor's prerogative whether to govern what is or is not allowed in his classroom. I just have a really big problem with the professor not having the cajones to tell students not to do something in his class, and instead resorting to flat-out lying by saying that the law school rules prohibit something that they clearly do not address (or, if they do, then it's not posted in a place where students can easily access them).
In any event, classes are over next week...and then we can eat wherever we darn well please.
Labels: classes
i learn something new every day
Now this is how I should have been approaching my last semester in law school...
Me (upon seeing a friend of mine leaving the building before First Amendment): What is this, three in a row?
Him: Hey, I went last Wednesday. Once a week is enough.
Me: Probably.
Him: I don't recall any attendance policy in that class.
Me: This is true. Plus, there's that whole "Pass/Fail" option thing.
Him: Exactly. And [Dangerous Mind] takes really good notes.
Me: Yeah......hey, wait!
I think a few skip days during which I do nothing but sit on my couch and play Super Mario Galaxy for Nintendo Wii are in order.
Labels: classes
reading over shoulders is a valuable skill
My Contracts II class is about 85% 1Ls. It's even more torturous than it sounds.
Last week, our professor went on a rant about how most contracts are poorly drafted and that law schools do little to remedy that problem. So I look up from my game of Tetris 2 for a few minutes and see that the kid in front of me has written the following in his notes:
"Law school does not spend lot of time talking and teaching how to draft contracts, and therefore many lawyers are not good at drafting contracts."*
......At that point, I really just wanted to pat that kid on the head and tell him that it's all going to be okay one day...and that if that sentiment is on the exam, I'll be sure to look outside to see if four dudes are riding up Bascom Hill on horseback.
Instead, I went back to my game of Tetris 2. Because, well...my record during that hour and twenty minute class is Level 32 - I have to beat that before the semester's over.
*Any errors in grammar are that kid's, not mine.
Labels: classes, contracts
chickens are made to be fried
Maybe I'm just a prude, but there's something mildly disconcerting about listening to my somewhat-elderly First Amendment professor discuss the obscenity-related cases. Especially when he comes out with stuff like this:
"It's normal sexual behavior if someone uses a feather......it's kinky if someone uses the whole chicken."
Labels: classes, con law
the beginning of the end
My last semester in law school has finally started.
One of my professors today asked everyone to go around the room and explain why they're taking the class.
And, you know me - I firmly believe that honesty is always the best policy. So instead of coming up with some crap explanation for why I want to learn a particular subject, I told the class the truth:
"I'm in this class because the materials cost less than $100."
(To be fair, the class does look fascinating, and I am rather excited to take it. But the story of how I ended up in this class in the first place is way more entertaining.)
Labels: classes
it'd be awesome if the bookmart sold used textbooks
I just dropped a class for next semester simply because I didn't feel like shelling out $130 for brand-new materials.
I'm pretty sure that this signifies yet another new low in my law school career. Then again, I could just try to pass this off as me standing up for the principle that, since my tuition payments cover waaaaaaaay more than the value of the education I'm receiving (including the quality of the law school facilities), my books should be comped. Or at least available for a reasonable price.
Of course, while changing my schedule around, I kept having this nagging thought that this may not be my last semester, since odds are pretty good that I failed either Tax or Secured Transactions last semester. (In fact, I probably failed both - even though I actually studied for those exams and thought that I understood the material. Go figure.)
And this just in: the Character and Fitness portion of the bar application is torture. (Muffled voices in background.) Okay, so I've just been informed that every law student ever has felt this exact excruciating pain.
Labels: bookmart, classes
honesty is the best policy, even in class
A paraphrase of something that actually happened in class this morning:
Professor: [Dangerous Mind], do you want to play the defense attorney for this?
Me: No.
Professor: Well, too bad.
...a few minutes later...
Professor: So, [DM], do you really not want to be the defense attorney?
Me: No. I have no idea what's going on in here.
Professor: And why not?
Me: Because I haven't been in class for a week and a half.
It's not my fault that I couldn't get decent flights for Thanksgiving that allowed me to actually come to class last Wednesday and this past Monday. I swear. Besides, I'm less cranky when I'm in the warm weather and thawed out and basically not sitting in my crappy apartment in Madison.*
Meanwhile, I have a paper due in that class tomorrow (basically), I haven't read a thing, and I'm fairly certain that I missed some really important things while not being in class. So, that's going to be some serious fun tonight....and all I really want to do is lay down and watch last night's "Bones" again.**
*Let's talk about apartments for a second. My sister's apartment in Mesa, AZ has a bathroom that is larger than my KITCHEN. And she pays a couple hundred dollars less per month than I do. HOW IS THIS FAIR?!?!?!?! (Quick answer: it's not fair.)
**Let's be honest. I'm going to do that anyway. It's my second favorite show, and last night's episode was rather enjoyable. I'm not going to lie; if I was forced to kiss David Boreanaz for five steamboats, I'd consider that a good day.
Labels: classes, t.v.
things i did to stay awake
What I did in class today:
-- Shopped for sweaters on bananarepublic.com.
-- Read up on the latest (non-)dealings in the Writers' Guild of America strike.
-- Worked on the motion I have due in class tomorrow.
-- Looked for classes to take next semester. (Seriously, it's really hard to try and decide which crap is least...crappy.)
-- Created a new mix CD in iTunes.
-- IMed/e-mailed friends.
Up next: looking for players for my fantasy football teams to make up for the fact that the Patriots have a bye this week. It's going to be tough, though, to make up for the 25 points per week I get out of Tom Brady.
Labels: classes, fantasy football
updateage
So where have I been over the last ten days? Well...
**Birthday. Yes, I turned 26 last weekend. Did I have a good time? Yeah. Did I get to do what I really wanted to do for my birthday? No. But oh well. I did have a very lovely dinner on my birthday after a fun trip to the corn maze, so I can't complain too much. (But I wish I had been able to find a cheaper flight to Arizona to spend the weekend with my sister, who actually would have been willing to do what I wanted to do on my birthday, instead of making plans for my birthday and expecting me to be happy tagging along with those.)
**Sick. Of course, birthday weekend ended with me getting sick, and spending most of the past week sitting in class with a fever. (Note to the rest of the UW Law School: you're welcome.) Because this is me we're talking about, of course I had to get sick during the one week this semester where I've actually had work to do. Speaking of which...
**Schoolwork. I had two writing assignments, a cite checking packet, and...something else...all due last week. I've gotten the first writing assignment back and discovered that I completely misunderstood the instructions that my professor didn't really explain at all. (Apparently, "outside case law" meant "Wisconsin cases not in the materials". Who knew?) All that work led to me sitting in the library about ready to pass out with the above-mentioned fever. Although now that I think about it, I have a feeling that the schoolwork caused my illness. I have to believe that, at this point, my body is just completely opposed to doing anything productive, and my immune system is doing whatever it takes to keep me on the couch watching TV like I should be.
**Relaxation. So I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of the fly-over at the UW football game. No, I didn't go do the cane toss. I figured other people who actually had family coming to the game needed the tickets more than I did....and besides, I won my first trial over the summer. So unless the cane toss is now giving people "find a job" luck, it's really wasted on me. Saturday night was Halloween, which involved me not getting dressed up before going to a friend's house to watch scary movies. Sunday, I went and saw Dan in Real Life, which I was very impressed with. Honestly, I think Steve Carell has more than proven that he has actual acting talent, and isn't just a funnyman along the lines of Will Ferrell. (Okay, okay. I cried during this movie. I'll admit it.)
**Football. I know I touched on the Badger game above, but I need to take some time to point out that I'm really enjoying this football season. But that's probably because I'm a New England Patriots fan, and I'm having fun taunting my friends who are Redskins fans about the fact that Washington didn't really show up in Foxborough during yesterday's 52-7 trouncing. It's just a shame that I can't get Super Bowl tickets....
Labels: classes, madison, my neverending medical issues, new england patriots
where'd i put my 'role of the prosecutor' cliff's notes?
I have a (very short, max 5 pages) paper due tomorrow.
The paper is supposed to discuss "the ideal prosecutor", based on my summer experiences and what we've discussed in class over the last four weeks.
Would've been nice if I had known that that would be the topic before I spent the three weeks before receiving the topic not paying attention. This is gonna be interesting...just like all those times I wrote papers in high school without ever reading the books about which I was supposed to be writing.
(The good news is that I always got A's on those papers. I never read Heart of Darkness or A Tale of Two Cities, but my papers on those books were excellent. Then again, I went to a public high school. In the south. Not exactly swimming in the deep end of the gene pool.)
Labels: classes, richmond
paying attention in class won't help me understand it anyway
For those of you who saw me walking around the law school this morning.... yes, I was barefoot. And no, I don't care. I bought new flats over the weekend because I wanted shoes that were stylish, yet conducive to the mile-and-a-half walk home from school (i.e., not three-inch stilettos). However, said flats are not yet broken in, and by the time I got to my bus stop this morning, both of my feet were bleeding. So even if the floor in the law school is disease-ridden (which I'm sure it is, because crushed hopes and dreams leave a nasty rash), I'd rather risk it than deal with the pain of having a third layer of skin taken off of my heels by my shoes.
Should I be scared that I feel like Secured Transactions is already waaaaaaaaay over my head?
You know what? I'm not going to think about that right now. The new season of "CSI: Miami" starts tonight, which means that I'll watch David Caruso stare at the screen and give a one-liner that sums up the upcoming episode right before the scream in "Won't Get Fooled Again" starts the opening credits while wearing those really AWESOME shades. That'll be good for a few laughs.Labels: classes, david caruso
click it good
Through two years of law school, I've managed to avoid any classes that employ The Clicker. The Clicker is a device that...you know, I don't know what The Clicker does, exactly. I think it's a thirty-some-odd piece of equipment that allows you to vote for a particular response, kind of like the "Ask the Audience" lifeline on Millionaire.* So I get to the Bookmart today to buy my $500 worth of books (by far the most I've spent during my seven year education). The girl at the window starts assembling my pile, then comes back and asks, "You don't really want a clicker, do you?"At that moment, I realized that maybe the Bookmart is really on our side. They know that The Clicker is a useless piece of crap...and that the $30 I would spend on a Clicker would be better spent on other things...such as "The Office: Season 3". So I leftThe Clicker at the Bookmart. And The Clicker won't be joining my schoolbook family until the day when use of The Clicker seriously impacts my grade. Until then, I'll pantomime clicking on my cellphone when I start texting people to tell them that Clickers are ridiculous.*Apparently, the old "raise your hand" device is too cheap for the faculty to ask the students to use. Labels: bookmart, classes
the fiddy defense
Okay, I admit it. I was too busy reading about the fact that Mark Prior is out for the season to actually pay attention to most of my Evidence class today. The one thing I manage to overhear, though, is a fact pattern involving a statement a deceased declarant made after getting taken to the hospital with six gunshot wounds. My professor asks the class if anyone can counter the dying declaration hearsay exception.So I pipe up with this: "Well, if 50 Cent can get shot, like, eight times and survive, this guy can get shot six times and think he'll survive."Suddenly, I don't look so stupid for reading celebrity gossip blogs instead of studying, do I?(You know what? Don't answer that.)Labels: classes, evidence, ridiculous hypotheticals
according to darwin, i should be dead
So we have the pleasure of having T&E class in a different room today. I sit down at the seat I find the most agreeable to my head angle/typing/make-it-look-like-I'm-paying-attention tendencies, and start trying to plug my computer in. It doesn't work. I try my neighbor's outlet; it doesn't work.Like the genius I am, I start jiggling the plug in the outlet, trying to somehow work the plug into the actual outlet. After about a minute, I feel a strange sensation in my thumb. You know, where I got shocked. By a faulty outlet.In the law school.One of my friends in class told me that she thinks that I got shocked because the law school is mad at me for hating it so much. You know, like that episode of "The X-Files" where Mulder and Scully are in the middle of Florida on the way to an FBI retreat and end up getting attacked in the forest by the invisible spirit of the trees that has come to life to attack people.Maybe the next time I sit down to watch "The X-Files", I should really think about picking up a book on electric wiring. You know, since my tuition apparently doesn't pay for someone to come into the law school and fix that sort of problems.Labels: classes, x-files
i hate making choices
I'm trying to decide which class I want to take Pass/Fail: Trusts & Estates or Evidence.I'm fairly confident that I'm going to bomb one of them; I'm just not sure which one it'll be. Now, I've been operating under the assumption that I'm going to pass/fail T&E, mostly because I have no idea what's going on in there (aside from how to distinguish marital property from individual property). On the other hand, I feel like I have a good grasp of Evidence.Now, with one exception, the classes I feel like I have the best grasp in have been my lowest grades in law school. And my Evidence class is rather small (only about 40 students), and half of those students are your top-of-the-class, journal/moot court types. Conversely, there's about 120 people in T&E, which means that there's a lot more room for "B" students on the curve. But I'd have two more days to study for my Evidence final. So what's the best way to go about this? Do I go with my initial intention and P/F T&E, or do I try and play the curve (and my Scott Norwood-like choking ability) and P/F Evidence?Labels: classes, finals
don't i have a constitutional right to not smell someone's foul odor?
They say that there's a time and place for everything.I'm assuming that this includes overloading on the perfume. You know the type of perfume - that stinky, musky, come-hither perfume that is only appropriate in bars?Yeah. The time and place for that perfume does not include Trusts & Estates class. Especially when that perfume is worn in such a high quantity that the person behind you can smell you when the air conditioning blows a certain way.Needless to say, I'm highly offended by this odor, and I think this person needs to enter some sort of rehabilitative facility to deal with her perfume addiction. If not for the rest of the student body that has to smell this crap, but for herself.Labels: classes, law school douchebags
swallow first, then answer question
Our Prosecution class is ridiculously early in the morning. (Granted, I think anything before 1pm is "ridiculously early", but I digress.) Since it's so early, it's not uncommon for students to bring breakfast to class. Yesterday, though, one of the students in class actually took a bite of their breakfast, then proceeded to volunteer an answer to a question - complete with a mouth full of food.Cut to this afternoon - this same person is in my Evidence class. (Quick sidebar: in my experience, most people don't volunteer to answer questions without having an answer - in fact, most people that know (or have a good idea about) the answer choose not to respond.)This particular person, so eager for those three participation points that probably aren't going to factor into our grades at all, volunteers to answer a question. Then, after the professor acknowledges this student (rather than the four others that also raised their hands), the student starts flipping through the textbook looking for the correct answer. (I can only compare this to the show "Jeopardy!", when people are trying so hard to get their buzzer to work that they ring in before actually figuring out the correct question.) It's not like this particular person never gets a chance to speak in either class. Rather, this person volunteers answers on a regular (read: constant) basis. I'm thinking that the over-eagerness bit, though, has started to cross the border into "kind of sad and just a little bit pathetic" territory. Labels: classes, evidence, law school douchebags
with friends like these, who needs enemies?
So I have this class that prepares us for our summer clinical positions. Part of this class involves basic writing assignments with feedback. And, unlike many of the people that sit around me, I consistently receive good feedback on these assignments. I was excitedly telling my friends about this one night last week - mostly because my lack of a boyfriend (to dictate every waking minute of my life outside of school) means that I have nothing else to drone on and on about. After talking about my semi-good fortune in this class, one of my friends pipes up, "Maybe you've finally found something in law school you're actually good at." (emphasis hers, not mine)I didn't think about it at the time, but the more time that passes, the more I think I'm actually insulted by that. I'm (fairly) certain she didn't mean that to come out as catty as it did...but I'm starting to second-guess myself by wondering if certain friends of mine honestly think that I'm not fit to grace the same "hallowed" halls as them. Labels: classes, madison
bracketology
So today, I came down with this horrible case of March Madness (cough cough) and couldn't bear to infect the rest of the law school population (cough). So I stayed home - never mind the fact that I woke up sometime after halftime of the first game today. And never mind the fact that none of my upsets have come through (although Davidson looked freakin' awesome in their game against Maryland).All I know is that today, being awesome does not look like the inside of my T&E classroom, but looks more like this:.jpg)
Labels: classes, march madness
better late than never?
My Prosecution professor informed us this morning that he'll have our syllabus ready for us next week. We've been in class for about 7 weeks now...and we have 6 weeks (and a day) left in the semester - so by the time this gets posted, we'll have a little over 5 weeks left. At this point, I think we'll be able to survive without it.In other news, the SBA has finally started posting final "Pay for your Locker or be Evicted" notices on the lockers on those students that haven't paid their $55 locker fee this year. Again...5 weeks left before exams...they've been asking for this money since AUGUST. Just how badly do they really need this money if they don't start demanding it until it's about 27 weeks overdue? How about this - don't expect these students to pay until you guys actually start doing something worthwhile.Labels: classes, the ridiculous SBA
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