CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

Unlike most law school students, I truly reveled in my 1L year and became, to my own utter shock and amusement, something akin to the class clown. It was nothing unusual to see me stroll in wearing pink pinstriped Chuck Taylors with my best suit while playing the air guitar to some 80’s rock tune on my iPod; nor to hear me crack the class jokes or laugh myself into tears at some unintended double-entendre regarding how the ripeness doctrine seeks to prevent premature adjudication in interstate intercourse. Most notably, however, was the sound of a bouncing racquetball that followed me wherever I went, joyfully announcing my presence to professors and students alike. In short, I was just darn happy to be alive and learning law.

But somewhere in the course of my 2L year (through which I am still struggling), and completely without noticing when or why or how, I realized something had changed. I didn’t wear the Chucks anymore. I didn’t wear the “Pure Genius” tee-shirt (circa WalMart 2007) under my best blazer. I didn’t crack the class jokes. My iPod droned out ballads that wondered where all the good times had gone. And I never, EVER bounced my ball.

What happened??? All these realizations hit me one day quite out of the blue, and I had no answer to “why”. I realized my visits to my favorite faculty member(s), which were once exuberant outpourings of witty bliss, had become sessions at the guidance counselor’s office, filled with heavy sighs and pleas for aspirin to kill a chronic headache. I realized my classes, which once had thrilled me with their sheer intellectual challenges, were now pure drudgery. And I realized I just wasn’t having any fun any more, concurrently wondering what the point was in continuing…

And that’s what law school does to you: it sucks the qi (the life force inherent in all things, for those of you unfamiliar with the brilliance of my past posts) right out of you. And it sucks the qi right out of everyone around you, too, so there’s no one objective left to tell you, “Hey! You there with the ball: BOUNCE IT!”

But perhaps it doesn’t have to. Perhaps law school, like Seuss’s Christmas, could mean “a little bit more.” Perhaps activities like the Evidence Academy Awards from the previous post or our own SBA Gag Awards could become school traditions just as important as the Book Awards, and maybe, if they did, they could lift the gloom a little. Maybe our professors – now largely immune to the perils of law student life – could see our unusual gloom and point it out, assuring us law school is a whole lot better for those who enjoy it. And maybe we, the students, in striving to be those self-regulated learner types (also blogged about earlier) prone to self-assessment, could take a moment or two more than we normally do to ask questions more important than how we could improve our latest memo; but rather to ask whether we’re still the people we started out as in this legal journey and, if not, whether the change has been for the better.

In the meantime, to those of you who own Chuck Taylors (students and professor alike), I say: wear them. To those of you with pithy tee-shirts: by all means, combine them with your best suit jacket. To ye class clowns: some jokes are too good to go un-heckled, so heckle on. To those of you prone to unabashedly playing air guitar to 80’s hair bands in the hallways: rock on. And, most importantly, to those of you who carry racquetballs with you: BOUNCE ON!

Your qi may very well depend on it…