HATE is easy…love takes COURAGE

Okay 1Ls, I’ve found something encouraging we can all do so that we feel like we’ve actually learned something this semester:

I encourage all of you to go back to the beginning of your casebooks.  Flip through the first couple of cases you read for each class.  Take a moment to look at the things you highlighted, underlined, noted, or otherwise marked in the text or in the margins.

Now, take a moment to think to yourself, “wtf….” and make this face.

If you’re anything like me and a few of my good friends, you highlighted completely irrelevant and nonsensical statements by the court, you made comments in the margins that were not useful or enlightening [how many of you wrote, "I agree!" or "What does this even mean?"], and you underlined things that just.  don’t.  matter.  I, for one, may as well have taken all my colored pens and scribbled “I don’t know what I’m doing” across the first ten pages of each of my books.

In going back to the beginning as I start to study for finals, I’m realizing that I have learned things this semester.  Aside from the black-letter nonsense I’m supposed to know for the finals, I’ve learned how to quickly read a case and pick out the rules and other important statements by the court.  Things that took me over an hour to figure out at the beginning of the semester now take minutes.  I remember when reading 60 pages of Contracts took me an entire weekend [Thursday through Sunday evening].  This weekend? I’ve read 130 pages since Friday morning, and that’s with multiple distractions, going out to eat, going to run errands, and generally having a life.

I just wanted to point this out to all of you so you can breathe a little sigh of relief and realize that while we might not be prepared for finals ::sadface:: we’ve definitely made progress since we started, and that’s worth noticing and smiling about.

Cheers.