Classes & Paints

So I've had a few people asking about how classes are going and it's been awhile since my last update. I don't have a ton to say and I've got some Torts to read so I'm gonna be brief on this one :-)

Classes

So the quick and dirty answer is they are going great (I think). For those who know nothing about how Law School works, your first semester you have Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Legal Writing and Legal Research. The first 3 are the ones where you learn the "thinking like a lawyer" type of skills, while the other two are for more practical things, like doing good professional writing (what this most certainly is not) and how to look stuff up in legal databases and books (which is a bigger pain than you might think).

The unique thing about law school (vs. undergrad, I've got no experience with other grad schools) is that you get pretty much zero feedback on how you're doing unless you're "on-call". The feedback you get when you're on-call is just how bad your professor beats you up over the case that you are supposed to know inside and out. Being on call isn't nearly as nerve wracking as some folks make it out to be. Each professor has a different way of doing it, in Torts they split the room in half, and one side is on-call one day, the other side the next day, in Contracts she basically just picks two people and they are kind of "it" for that class. In Civil Procedure they use a random generator so it could be you any time. Generally speaking if you do the reading carefully you should be able to at least talk somewhat intelligently on what happened. It gets a lot easier a couple weeks in too.

We are now getting in to that wonderful time of year where you really need to start preparing your outlines for finals and looking forward to that exciting adventure. I have some pretty basic ones started and a couple free "commercial" ones that I got so I've got something to model mine after and make sure they have what I need in them. It's helped a lot to go through the process of creating them though as it really helps kind of drive home what we're doing.

Did I mention there is an absolute TON of reading? oh yea there is a bit.

Overall though, it's really kinda of fun, and challenging. I can only say that about a couple classes I had in undergrad so I guess I'd have to say overall it's going great. Once you become comfortable with the idea that the answers aren't really the important part, it's showing how you got the answer you did (thanks algebra!) it becomes a lot less stressful.

And Paints
So I said there would be some paints. We painted the office a few weeks ago and it really got me thinking a lot about my Dad. See when I was a kid my Dad was an apartment manager (among a couple other jobs too) and rather than have regular chores around the house if I wanted money he would pay me to do stuff around the apartments. This included a lot of painting, so I guess it just sort of reminded me of that. Which lead down a train of thought to all the random stuff I've already done in our house to make it a little more "ours". It's weird cause all I really saw it as was a chance to make some money so I could do whatever crap it was that I was going to do with the money but looking back now, I'm super grateful he gave me the chance to do that work because it was generally largely unsupervised. How many 12 year olds really get to be their own boss?

So that was a little ramble about painting. But the point I hope to get across there was just a big "Thanks Dad". I don't know if the intent was to actually teach me something, or if it was just cheap labor (likely a combination of both) but it was nice to have a little reflection in working getting that done.

So now it's really late and I have a class to get to early tomorrow so I better get to bed. I'll try to get another one up soon, likely about being abandoned by my wife and forced to try to get these freaking dogs to stop trying to kill each other (and me along with them).