Our house is about half-functional these days as we are finally doing some very needed repairs to a really old house. It is expensive, loud, and dusty. The main contractor and my dog have the same name which is confusing– and sometimes entertaining. They have taken our kitchen and a bathroom down to the studs (I have learned that beams are entirely different things). They’ve shown me the horsehair drywall that lives behind painted walls. I’ve dealt with the strange optical illusion that rooms that are emptied and without walls somehow look smaller than the rooms did when they were full of furniture and appliances. Is it the light or lack of it? Who knows-but it was a little mind-blowing. It was really disconcerting for me to see an empty room as less space than a full one.
This illusion is something I think about when talking to first year students about the exponential increase in reading and other expectations this time of year. If you do nothing but being a law student-bring it down to the studs of reading, briefing, and outlining, then there is the chance your capacity may seem smaller than it did when you had other activities in your life. However, maybe the expectations and challenges seem smaller when that is all there is to work on.
I have written before about how the run up to Halloween is spooky season for 1L students. The honeymoon that follows orientation is over and their ghoulish spouse (law school) is eating their brain. One thing we can in ASP is (after meeting with a student) to figure out if they need a bare, empty room type of strategy or a space with full context type of strategy-or both depending on the class. We do have to remind them to keep their whole household running in the background, for example: a legal writing assignment should not be the only thing that gets attention at the expense of other obligations.
Our 1L’s are undergoing renovation. It will be a semester long project where they continuously make good changes but will also likely make mistakes and have to rework things. I think letting them know we are here and that we see them working on it is most of what we need to do to help. We can also acknowledge that there will be dusty boot prints on the stairs at times and remind them that this is the price of improvement. All of us are works in progress which is why we practice-rather than perfect-law.
(Liz Stillman)
