Chaos Descends

School has begun. I teach two (undergraduate) classes, take two (graduate) classes, and grade papers for an hourly wage on the side. Lots of busy. I've decided that what kills me about academia is the summer and the regular (and rather lengthy breaks): All that time off is forever an unfulfilled promise. You begin teaching thinking you'll have such a great schedule with big, huge breaks on holidays and during the summer, but this never turns out to be the case.

The cycle begins every August when you wake up and realize that the summer is almost over. You panic and try to pack as much in to the final weeks off as possible, which usually means you have to catch up on mundane chores like yardwork or whatever that you've put off all summer. This means you don't really prepare well for the fall (by spending more time developing your syllabi and lesson plans, or by reading ahead for the classes you'll be taking). Since you start a bit behind, work begins piling up quickly and you just as quickly start mentally scheduling fall break (Thanksgiving) as a catch-up time. Work through fall break, taking a day (maybe two) to lay in front of the tv and let your brain have a bit of a breather. Then bam! The semester's over, it's winter break (Christmas), and you've postponed so much over the course of the semester that you spend half or more of the "break" finishing up a paper that you had to ask for an extension on, so that again you start the spring semester behind and without adequately preparing lessons and materials for the classes you're going to teach and take, which means you're behind when spring break rolls around so you work through that, too, and when May finally comes and summer is supposed to begin, you probably have a paper (or by this time, two) dragging into June, and as soon as you finish that (or while you're finishing it) you're frantically looking for some sort of summer income to make it through the lean months and if you're lucky you find some kind of teaching- or editing-related gig that provides you (at most) something like $1000/mo. during summer, meaning you still can't really take any breaks because you have to work and because you can't afford to travel or indulge in any extras, and then it's late August and fall semester is starting and you haven't had the time or energy to prepare your lessons and class materials and....

....and it all begins again.

The bottom line is this: You get less vacation as an academic, not more. (And this isn't even getting into the fact that you never get a free weekend since weekends are filled with grading and class prep and catching up on the reading you fell behind on during the week.)

Don't you wish you could be a college English graduate student and instructor!? Good times, man. Goooood times.

(Of course, some people love the academic life, and thrive in it, and to them I say "More power to you." However, if you're thinking of applying to graduate school in the Humanities, let me humbly suggest that you not make the same mistakes I made and ignore all advice along the lines of the above about how it's often not all it's cracked up to be. One thing I've definitely learned in the past three years is that sometimes we should listen to the people who have gone down the road before us. Perhaps that's why I've been so obsessed with finding opinions and information about law school and law before jumping in with both feet...)

Posted 09:42 PM | life generally

LSAT Schmellsat?

This doesn't seem like a bad way to start down a road toward law: I took the LSAT with zero prep and scored 163. Perhaps with a few weeks of studying, I'll manage to qualify for scholarships somewhere! (Knock on wood.) I'll keep the fingers crossed, buckle down, and pray the logic games start to make some sense soon.

Meanwhile, Sua Sponte points to Waddling Thunder, another 1-L blog of what appears to be a somewhat experimental nature. Still, what fun to view the whole enterprise of law school through these people's eyes. I mean, why should I even bother going, if those ahead of me are going to tell me all about it on their blogs?

Speaking of JCA, she of the strangely captivating blog, I'd put my money on her not really liking the volunteer clinic she's exploring. Call it a guess educated by her previous posts, but I just don't get the idea she's the public interest, law clinic type.

Posted 10:54 AM | Comments (1) | law school

Blogging Politics

Sites like dailysummit.net, a blog about the World Summit on Sustainable Development, are what make blogs such cool things. This summit is something that's only getting blippy headlines here and there, but for those who want more than "there's an environmental summit right now in Johannesburg, dude," dailysummit.net delivers. The link comes via Scripting News, which recently has awakened to the practical political power of weblogs. Its author, Dave Winer, has designed a website for libertarian North Carolina congressional candidate Tara Sue Grubb. I've been reading Winer regularly for the past six months and it's great to see him finally awakening to what could be a really great thing for democracy -- blogs and politics. Yeah, he's only interested because the North Carolina incumbent has proposed some goofy computer legislation (which I actually find difficult to take seriously because it's so patently absurd), but at least it's a start. With any luck, Winer will wake up and realize that there are dozens if not hundreds of other issues that need an advocate with an audience. Go Dave!

Of related interest is Grubb herself. She's only 26, a single mother, and she's obviously campaigning on nothing more than what seems right to her. No focus groups, no opinion polls, no speechwriters or even PR people (as far as I can tell). Wouldn't it be great if campaigns like this could really take off? What if we had more than two options for every political contest? What if you didn't need several million dollars to buy your way into office? Grubb represents, for the moment, a hint of what our world could look like. Of course she won't win, but here's hoping that by being an honest candidate with a weblog, she's starting something that will grow far beyond one North Carolina congressional contest.

Posted 10:51 AM | meta-blogging

Moritz 1L Advice

More "real world" advice on law school from Garret Moritz. Some good, fresh information here, and his first tip—Embrace Confusion—is very heartening. Just like I'm all about ambiguity, I'm all about confusion. I can be very comfortable when confused (though that sounds strange to say), and in fact I'm almost reflexively suspicious of things that seem too cut and dried (because, again, the world just doesn't work in binaries, despite what programmers might lead you to believe). Although Moritz has probably never read it, his description of the "legal fault lines" exposed by confusion is very like Alan Sinfield's description of how literary criticism works. Sinfield's book is called, not surprisingly, Faultlines. So after three solid years of learning to look for and appreciate the nuances of texts, situations, theories, and problems, I am well-prepared for embracing the confusion. I probably won't have too work too hard (but a little) on keeping my mouth shut, and semicolons were my friends a long time ago. (What's pretentious about punctuation that shows a close relationship between two otherwise complete sentences?)

Moritz also has a great piece on how cell phones are ruining society, and one about the fact that our society is more feudal than democratic. Great stuff. Couldn't agree more. In fact, gTexts is the latest addition to the blogroll at left. Moritz describes himself as "a remorseless windbag and busybody," and while anywhere else those might be seen as negative traits, at gTexts they produce hours of fun.

Posted 10:00 PM | law school

LSAT Lameness

Below is a sample LSAT question and the possible answers. What do you think the answer is?

Question:
Six months ago, a blight destroyed the cattle population in the town of Cebra, eradicating the town's beef supply. As a result, since that time the only meat available for consumption has been poultry, lamb, and other non-beef meats.

Which of the following can be reasonably inferred from the statements above?

1. Villagers in the town of Cebra consume only beef raised by Cebra farmers.


2. Cebra villagers prefer lamb and poultry to beef.
   
3. The town of Cebra has not imported beef for consumption during the last six months.


4. Most of the residents of Cebra are meat eaters.


5. Before the blight occurred, Cebra villagers ate more beef than any other type of meat.

Click "more" for the answers.

Choice (3) is correct. If elimination of the town's beef supply means that no beef has been available, then the town must have had no external beef provider for the past six months.

Choice (1). We know that Cebra-raised beef has not been available for the past six months, and that beef in general has not been available for the past six months. What role does non-Cebra beef play in this situation? If beef has not been available at all, we can't infer if it's because Cebrans don't eat non-Cebran beef, or because non-Cebran beef hasn't been available.

Choice (2). This choice addresses unsupported meat preferences. The argument centers on availability, not preference.

Choice (4). We have no basis to infer that most Cebrans are meat-eaters.

Choice (5). This choice is concerned with consumption patterns prior to the blight, but our stimulus provides no information from which we can infer previous beef consumption. We only know that the blight wiped out the beef supply six months ago, and since that time beef has not been available.

-----

I got the question right, but I found myself making a plausible case (in my head) for the answer to be 1. Why? After thinking about it a bit more, I don't know, because obviously the question of whether Cebrans eat non-Cebran beef would be second to whether it's even available for consumption, and it couldn't be available if no non-Cebran beef had been imported. The point is, the questions are phrased such that they can appear to be asking you to make fine distinctions, which are often not so fine after all. Tricky. But then, I could see why some lawyers would try to make such tricks their stock in trade... Must remember to watch the details. If it takes too much thought, I've probably missed an obvious distinction somewhere.

Posted 09:13 PM | law school

Life is short. Misery is overrated.

'Tis the "back-to-school" season and advice for new law students is plentiful (and welcome). Although the earliest I would start law school would be a year from now, hearing what people have to say about it helps clarify my decision to work toward that goal.

First, there's Dahlia Lithwick's advice in Slate [via Jason Rylander, who has also generously offered terrific and pointed thoughts on the subject]. Lithwick provides a pithy summary of a lot of the best things I've already read and heard elsewhere: Know why you're going to law school and you'll have to work very hard to avoid the lure of BigLaw once you've racked up all those loans. A little line buried within point B-1 is what I'm most concerned about. Lithwick writes:

Law school manages to impose odd new values on virtually everyone.

Of course this is true—it would be difficult or impossible to go through three years of intense education and not be changed by it, and many of those changes are the whole reason for going. Still, I fear law school's homogenizing effects. I feel confident enough in my views and values to know I won't come out of law school some free-market neo-conservative, but how much more "mainstream" might it make my political views? And yet, more "mainstream" is exactly what I hope law school will make me (in a way). People who are too radical or extreme are often dismissed, and our society has developed effective mechanisms for keeping extremes (especially socialist/progressive extremes) safely in the margins where they can make lots of noise but have little practical effect. So law school appeals to me in that it appears to be a way to take a radical sensibility and apply it to mainstream methods of social change (laws, public policy). I guess it's the cliche of trying to "use the master's tools to destroy the master's house," except I don't want to destroy so much as remodel extensively. So if law school gives me a better sense of the mainstream and teaches me how to better communicate with that mainstream, I should come out a much more effective agent for social change. That would be the ideal outcome, the goal. So the challenge is to learn which of those "odd new values" I encounter in law school might be helpful for a progressive social activist, and which of them are just the siren song of the bourgeoisie.

A lot of advice for 1-Ls has to do with not being obsessed with grades or showing off to your professors or whatever, and with having "a life" outside of grad school. That kind of thing forms a large part of "Down the Rabbit Hole," some advice from "Alice W." [via Sua Sponte] All of this sort of advice seems targeted at the serious Type-A personalities. Even the "don't be a recluse" advice is about not spending too much time in the library. I think the advice I'd need would be more like: "Take this seriously—it really is important."

Then there's Top 10 Law School Survival Skills from Lois Schwartz on law.com [also via Sua Sponte]. Point 3 is very encouraging:

Trust yourself. If you are confused, it's because law is confusing, not because you are inadequate for the task. Never, ever sweep ambiguous or unfamiliar matters under the rug -- law is about ambiguities, not clear-cut matters. I always tell my students to stop seeking the black-and-white version of legal principles -- lawyers are involved in the gray areas. If something is hard to understand, keep at it. Look up all new terms in the law dictionary or ask someone for help. If a fact could have mixed legal significance, note all possible interpretations. A good lawyer appreciates the complexities and does not attempt to hide from them.

I'm all about the ambiguities. In fact, the "black-and-white" version of almost anything has always eluded me. So again, this speaks to one of my more prominent reservations about law—that it forces you to reduce the world to either/or binaries or to follow "the law" as if it were black and white. Since life isn't like that, it's good to hear from a lawyer that law and law school don't have to be like that either.

Schwartz also defines what a "hornbook" is—finally! I've been seeing references to these things everywhere, but no one's taken the time before to tell me that hornbooks are "scholarly treatises on law school subjects." Now I know. But wait. Does that mean a hornbook is basically an academic essay or journal article? Or are we talking book-length works only?

Posted 11:18 AM | law school