All Alone in the Dark...

Our power is out. I'm sitting here at the moment blogging in the deep, dank basement of my house on my laptop, which connected to a UPS that runs my Internet connection and now runs my laptop and a desk lamp, so I can finish my contracts reading for Wednesday. The UPS is currently connected to a portable generator outside that is making a lot of noise. the situation is strange, and I'm beginning to get cold (our heater uses electricity for blower and ignition). However, the contracts work is getting done.

The biggest disadvantage to all of this is the fact that the UPS does not have enough power to connect workstation upstairs, which has the printer attached to it, and I'm short a USB cable to boot. So I cannot print off my research for my appellate brief. This is a very bad thing, and I don't even want to guess how late I'll be up tomorrow printing off anywhere between 200-300 pages of documents after hours and hours of research, in addition to the hours and hours I put in on Wednesday and Thursday.

DTE says the electricity should be back by 11:30pm, but they're rarely correct about that. I'm probably going to have to sleep in my hunting gear tonight, as it provides ample warmth for even sub-zero temperatures. I'll also probably use my sleeping bag as a blanket. I can use my cell phone to wake me up in the morning, so that's not a problem.

On a side note, my grade in torts got bumped to an A-, which makes me very happy, but my grade in criminal law was a C+, which makes me very unhappy. I never thought I'd do so poorly on any test, but I have to consider it an outlier, given the great job I did on my other exams and on my research memo. I'll just have to accept it and try to do better I guess. I'm still waiting on my final grade for Civil Procedure, but I don't hold out much hope for that being bumped to an A-. Still, it ain't over till it's over.

More Grades to Report...

Got my Civil Procedure and Torts grades today, and they were both B+'s. I got my criminal law exam back with the point totals, but not the grade yet. I can tell just by looking at the score that this will not end well. I got 69 points on it, out of a possible 140. The highest I saw while sifting through various exams to find mine was a 100. This obviously does not bode well for me. I'll be extremely lucky to get a B- and probably quite lucky to get a C+.

I'm most concerned because that's the class I wanted to do best in, because it's the field I wanted to practice in. I don't feel like I'm clueless about criminal law, I just feel like I had a bad test, as is evidenced by the other 3 tests where I got a B+ and legal research and writing where I'm currently maintaining an honors pass. I just guess I'm a little depressed that I didn't do as well as I would have liked, and that I will probably lose my scholarship now unless I can do significantly better this semester. I'll do my best and that will have to be good enough.

Constitutional Law Nightmare...

I knew law school was going to be hard work from the moment I decided to become an attorney. I expected to put in roughly 65-72 hours per week doing law school related work. I just had Con Law today, and now my expectations have shot up to 72-80 hours per week because of one class. I looked at the reading assignments today and I couldn't believe what I saw. I thought maybe my calculations were off, so I ran some rough numbers. We have to read as much for Con Law as we have to for all our other courses COMBINED, INCLUDING a 4 hour property course. It's worth mentioning that Con Law is a 3 hour course.

I'm not saying that what we're going to learn in there doesn't need to be learned. What I'm saying is that if they're going to make us put in 18 hours of work per week into one class, it should be worth more than 3 damn credits. Furthermore, there's no reason why it shouldn't be split into two semesters like contracts or civil procedure. I don't know. Maybe the faculty thinks that law students need to learn how to function without sleep. That is effectively the burden they're putting on us here and I'm not a big fan of it.

Our largest single assignment is to read 124 pages in one weekend. This is not easy reading material. This is VERY dense material with very difficult philisophical questions to answer and the only way to understand the material is to consider the questions the book poses and try to answer them, even though most don't have a right answer per sé. It took me 3.5 hours just to get through 30 pages of reading. I personally don't think it's fair to put the students through this for 3 credits, but that's just my humble opinion.

My First Grade...

Well the verdict is in. My grade in contracts is a B+. I checked the board last night before I left and it happened to be posted. I must admit I feel both good and bad about the grade. I feel good because it's a high grade and keeps me in roughly the top 30-35% of that class, but I feel bad because that's the exam I felt most confident about. This makes me worry a bit about what the grades in my other classes will be. I'm certainly not ashamed of a B+ and I feel I earned it. I will strive to do better this semester and get into the 'A' range. I'm just happy that the grades are finally starting to come in. Hopefully more will get posted tomorrow. I'd really just like to figure out if I get to keep my scholarship or not at this point.