About a year ago, I decided to go to law school. 22 weeks into law school, I feel fairly convinced that this was a mistake. Others in my class might not be prepared to say that, but I am.
At work, when you're paying me, I'm a damn good worker. I've never gotten anything except stellar reviews at work. Money is my carrot, I've always been able to get things done for it. When I worked for IBM, I took off many, many weeks to teach for another company. I would teach during the day and log in at IBM at night, and I would get all of my work done. I also did work on the weekends if necessary, before and after I went away. My schedules never slipped, I never missed a deadline.
But I could see my results on a daily basis. I could tell how well I was doing, I knew where I stood. If my code was broken, I could try to fix it, run it again, and see where I was then. Law school doesn't have any feedback loop whatsoever. There is no day-to-day validation that you're doing things right. You can't tell a damn thing about how you did until the grades get posted.
Here's the law school game: every day, you have a reading assignment. You're supposed to read it and be ready to talk about it in class the next day. That's it. That's the game. There are no homework assignments, nothing to turn in. (I lie slightly, there is a writing class, but the writing assignments are infrequent, and it's only one class) Now, those of you who know me know how inclined I am to distraction. I'm very willing to do something other than work if you come up with it. So this system doesn't really work all that well for me. I need deadlines, I need homework where I can apply what I'm learning.
Another big problem with this game, for me, is my background. I was a computer science major in college, never had to do reading assignments. So now, even when I do the reading, I don't know what to do with anything I get out of the reading. I've never learned how to learn solely from reading, I was always able to read something and put it into practice. Now it feels like I'm learning in a vacuum, I have no outlet for anything I learn, and I don't even know how to organize what I'm learning into a form that will be useful to me later.
The grades for law school are based on 1 3-hour test at the end of the semester. That's it. You have to write exactly what your professor is looking for, and if you get creative and deviate from that, you're going to get less credit. Even if your argument has merit. I've never thought of myself as a creative person before, but I actively tried to be creative on the exams to get more credit than other people. Didn't work out so well. My grades weren't awful, but they weren't as good as I thought they would be. More importantly, I didn't learn what I did wrong on the exams. Talking to the professors was next to useless (save one), and the comments on the exams were likewise worthless.
Law school professors think that it's still 50 years ago when they went to law school. It used to be that people would be kicked out of law school for doing poorly in classes. The teaching philosophy was one of "sink or swim." Today, no one drops out of law school because they did poorly. Or very few. There have been 2 people to drop in my class this year, and both did so because of health problems. But law school professors haven't caught up with the fact that pretty much every person in the class is going to make it to graduation and become a lawyer. They haven't caught up with the fact that law school has become much more of a vocational institution, rather than a scholarly one. They should be teaching us how to be good lawyers, not how to be good scholars, as very few of us are likely to end up scholars. And the process here doesn't seem to teach us how to be good lawyers.
So, in summary: I quit my relatively safe coding job at IBM, even though they let me take 15 weeks a year off to teach classes for another company (and paid me for the weeks I spent away). In 2002, I work 11 weeks, in 2003, I work 4 weeks, and I somehow decide that law school is a better place for me to be. In 2004, I realize that law school might not be for me. Where to now?
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