A waste of time

Something I've observed over the past year is that the "typical" class in law school is a waste of time for me. This isn't just an indictment of law school because I could make the same claim about most undergraduate courses I've seen.

The problem is that I don't learn well using the method of "teaching" employed in law school. This method typically involves a professor simply standing in front of a class and lecturing. Students are expected to understand the lecture and integrate it into their overall knowledge in real time or, at least, to furiously take notes and later read through them and do the integration/understanding. Often, if I have done the readings in advance, the lecture is repetitious and too tediously slow to stay focused on. If I have not done the readings, the lecture is often too rapid or complex to follow.

One strategy many students use to deal with this problem is to use "outlines"—class notes transcribed by past students—which they update or modify as they like. This removes the need to write everything down in real time as someone else has already done the grunt work.

This is only a coping mechanism for dealing with a flawed system though. The simple reality is that I do not learn well using this method. Sometimes I barely learn at all this way. I learn best by digesting smaller concepts and then applying them to practical examples. Ideally, I work best if I also get sufficient feedback at the practical application stage. This is why computer science was so relatively easy for me: the classes were not taught any better but I could ignore them because the textbooks in that field are well laid out and the subject matter lends itself to practical assignments. Best yet, when a student works through a computer science assignment, there is immediate, near constant feedback about the correctness of the work. Computer programs often work well or fail spectacularly.

I believe that a legal education might better be acquired the same way. I claim that students don't rail against 100% finals (common in law school courses) just because they hate being tested; I claim they also recognize that such methodology is not helpful to them. It is intuitively plain that having little to no feedback on your ability to apply knowledge and skills until the very last minute, when it is too late to correct, is a horribly ineffective way to learn. I would prefer many smaller assignments with some mechanism for plenty of feedback throughout the year. This, of course, means a lot more work for professors both in preparation and marking. Also, professors generally are not actually teachers and have very little education about education. And even professional teachers often have little or no education about "homework" construction.

This does not mean that no students like the current, common methodology in law courses. I realize that there are numerous different types of learning styles. Some people surely learn best from exactly the methods law school are using right now. In fact, the reason that many university courses are taught this way may be that many people who excel at learning from this method end up getting PhDs and becoming professors and repeating the cycle. But I'm not one of them.

I'm not saying there is no benefit to attending class, of course. Being physically present often lessens panic at the idea of missing something; even if the whole material is not absorbed easily often a vague understanding can be gleaned through class attendance; and there are many administrative details that can be gathered in class (exam dates and content, class cancellations, and so on). Still, after nearly a year and a half, I can safely say that the classroom is not where I'm acquiring any significant proportion of my education. :-(