Bad Law Student, be a Good Law Student

Okay, maybe one day I'll come back to finish my last post. But life, eh? Especially life in the lead-up to finals.

I'm sitting on the floor of the living room (from this blog, you'd think that's where I spend all my time), working on my Corporations outline. Because I'm one of those Bad Law Students who doesn't have their outline finished the day before the exam. I'm trying to ignore the voice in my head, taunting, "If you don't know it by now, you might as well forget it." Because I didn't know it by the day before my exams the last few semesters either, and I did okay.

I learned some major lessons this semester though. This Spring 2L year has been nothing like my other semesters, and not in a good way. I could blame it on my new laptop (I always handwrote before). I could blame it on my psychiatrist who basically laughed in my face at the beginning of the semester when I expressed concern about having ADD. I could blame it on the awesome winter break I had and the Xmas gift of Super Mario Wii, both of which were hard to put down. How about "all of the above"?

Whatever the case, when I sat down to finally get serious with my casebooks and *really* study for finals, I found exactly what I knew I was going to find all along. I'd avoided it but the day had finally come. Yes, when I cracked open Law of Agency and Corporations, this is what I found: Nothing. Blindingly white pages. Opening the file that supposedly contained my notes? Gobbledeegook. What?! What have I been doing all semester?!

Maybe I was expecting that somebody would see me frittering my time away and say, "hey, JE, you really need to get serious. You're going to be TESTED on all this stuff." Maybe I secretly thought, "The only thing that can wake me from this trance is to fall flat on my face." Maybe I believed that it didn't matter how hard I worked or didn't work, the grades would be random anyway.

I want to make a set of resolutions to myself for next semester. I've got a summer to refresh and recharge. I want to go back to being the hard-working, earnest student I was before this semester. I want to believe that I can get back my law school mojo. I don't want to carry around my old high school "too cool to study, too smart to fail" attitude, but I don't want to knock my teeth out on the concrete in order to rid myself of that mentality.

I may or may not be able to regain my Good Law Student badge, but if I even want a shot, here's what I must do next semester:

1. Throw out all my old highlighters with varying amounts of ink.
2. Buy a brand new pack - 6 colors: blue, yellow, pink, green, orange, purple.
3. Buy a bunch of pens with good ink flow.
4. Label the notebooks you bought this past semester and never used - put the name of one class on each.
5. Buy all your books before class starts.
6. Hand write your notes every day.
7. Don't bring your laptop to school.
8. If you have your laptop at school for some reason, activate Freedom for the entire time you plan to be on campus.
9. Highlight while you read.

Well. That's about it. Now back to cobbling together an outline for Corps before my 8-hour take home exam tomorrow. Best of luck to all youse students out there mucking your way through your own finals hell!