So, seven weeks into law school. If you read my "Prima Facie" post, you know that my first impressions were not entirely positive. Now that I'm settling into a routine, are things improving? Does it get better? Is there hope for pre-law undergraduates?

I believe the operative phrase here is, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate." That's Dante, the words emblazoned on the gates of Hell. The translation is, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Heh. Okay, that's not entirely fair. My classmates are, for the most part, an absolute delight. We have had some perfectly delicious debates on a wide variety of relevant and interesting topics. And my formal law classes--Torts, Property, and Civil Procedure--are a fair bit of work, but I'm learning a lot and from time to time I even enjoy myself. Class discussion is inevitably more interesting than the assigned reading, but you can't have one without the other, so the reading is tolerable enough. The points of frustration I mentioned before haven't gone away, but like so many other frustrations in life, after a while you just accept that you can't fix them right now and you put them on your to-do list.

But!

I do have one class (or perhaps more accurately, half a class) that continues to be an exercise in frustration and futility. Apparently I am not alone, either. Legal Research and Writing is the class I have come to refer to as "A game of three-card monte, with expectations as the queen of spades."

For those of you unfamiliar, three-card monte is a traditional grifter's game. You have three cards (one of them ostensibly the queen of spades) face up. The dealer flips them face-down and proceeds to mix the cards around. The object is to determine where the queen ends up; perhaps more to the point, the object is to lure people into placing bets on a game that looks easy ("just follow the queen, it's a piece of cake!"), cheat the unsuspecting gambler and scram.

See also: "shell game."

The research portion of this class is straightforward, though occasionally challenging. I'm learning a lot about legal research.

The writing portion of this class is an absolute nightmare. The instructor flatly contradicts herself, the TAs contradict the instructor, outside assistance contradicts them both, and the unsuspecting student is told in no uncertain terms that whatever they believe is a contradiction must in fact be a shortage of understanding. News flash: when the vast majority of your students--all of whom were able to secure undergraduate degrees and secure acceptance into a top-40 ABA accredited private law school--get something wrong, the problem is probably not with your students. It may be the instructor, it may be the approved methods of pedagogy, it may be the course material. In this case I think it is simply a matter of obfuscating expectations so as to simulate education. With each consecutive failure, further knowledge is revealed ("with a flourish . . . like some amateur magician who can't wait to tell you his secret so you can see how clever he is") and you do better on the revision. But--and this is important--not because you have learned anything more important than the professor's previously concealed expectations.

This is the opposite of education. It's literally education in reverse. When I ask direct questions, I am told that an answer would "give too much away" and make the assignment "too easy." The point of the assignment, apparently, is not to learn at all, but to stumble blindly about for a while because undirected work==hard work==learning.

This, of course, is complete garbage. And I, like Han Solo in the Death Star, must wade through it.

I am such a geek.

Ah, well. One more frustration for the to-do list. I will survive it one way or another. There are enough bright spots to to carry me through the semester, and I have been led to believe that things inevitably improve. But I'm not known for spreading sunshine so you'll have to deal with my complaints.

On a lighter note, though, my 3-year-old daughter is reading and spelling three- and four-letter words (not those four-letter words!) and my 1-year-old son is communicating with words! My children are so smart d^_^b. In spite of me being gone upwards of 12 hours every (week)day; their mother works with them and they're responding very well. A whole new generation of philosophers, that's what I'm going for.

Well, philosophers who play video games and read comic books. My daughter's favorite right now appears to be Hulk. This Christmas we're trying to make it a "Leap Pad Christmas" for her, but she'll probably get a Hulk action figure too.