This week, I welcomed my 3L students into my online section of our MEE/MPT class. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve done this. (But if you’re counting, this fall begins year 17 of full-time ASP teaching for me.) The new year brings new energy, new promise, and new chances for growth. It’s a good problem to have when the cup runneth over.
Yet if you are counting, an overfull cup does not tell the whole story. The cumulative weight of heavy lifting of ASP against the eternal (stronger?) headwinds that challenge our work is not without its long-term effects. I admit feeling a little dragged down by the recent weights of important-but-still-hard-to-hear constructive feedback from my fall 2026 and two particularly challenging bar cycles in winter and summer 2026. I may live in a seaside town tailor-made for sailing, but burdens like these can leave a boatload of New Year Momentum™ dead in the water.
Reframing struggle is one of the key tools in our toolbox, and it’s more than appropriate to use it here. That struggle is an opportunity. And I wanted to share with you how I’m trying to leverage that opportunity.
One of the most laborious but effective new things I was able to do this summer in tutoring bar students was to do an exceedingly long deep-dive skill session on MEE strategy start to finish for a commercial vendor. This scratched a long-held itch for me – to model, more or less in real time, every step of bar exam question strategy from start to finish, alongside students. This deep dive assumed absolutely nothing of any attendee, and it went very deliberatively from reading the call all the way through constructing every sentence of the finished product. My first time doing both the prep and the actual session went very long – over 4 hours. I was exhausted. I was managing 4 private message windows, the main Zoom chat, and any students who wanted to chime in auditorily at once. But aside from a single student comment after the very first deep dive, the students loved it. They told me so in chat dozens of times over during bar season, and they told my superiors at the vendor so. It was a bright spot in a bar cycle that was otherwise hurting for engagement.
With a full head of new semester steam, I wanted to run and create similar deep dives in my section (and also make them available to other sections). I knew this would be responsive to the aforementioned constructive (and otherwise, to be frank) criticism that the fall course’s slide decks were too heavy, that lecture felt too passive, and there wasn’t a sufficient enough breakdown of the how of the strategy. Many birds, meet one stone.
But I didn’t want to repeat the mistake many of us inadvertently make in ASP: creating an incredible resource that no one uses, and quickly depleting that sweet, sweet new steam engine in the process. Or at least creating a resource that was effective in one setting – actual bar takers, mid-cycle, having already signed up for commercial prep – but may not draw similar engagement in another one. In my case, that other setting is a group of 3Ls many months before their bar exams, already skeptical of the utility of a pre-bar class they are being required to take, and pre-decision and pre-sunk cost on any commercial provider.
So, I wanted to create some boundaries to contain my new energy. And I decided on these:
- I would do the deep dive asynchronously at first. This saved me the trouble of finding a commonly available time outside of class meetings, even though my original deep dives this past summer were synchronous (and, as mentioned above, the best kind of chaos).
- I would only do the deep dive on one of the questions in the target week’s homework set, not all of them. I did not want to obsolete the target week’s assignment – which was to read and outline two MPT questions – either. But I did want to model the kind of work that those 2 skills require, and lay bare their challenges from the jump, redundancy concerns notwithstanding.
- I originally reduced the scope of covering on the deep-dive – the first one was on performance test reading and outlining – to focus more on the reading. Coverage of the homework questions exists in the next in-class slides, so there is some overlap. But I tried to choose a stopping point that whet students’ appetites for outlining strategy in more detail and also created a sought-after discussion point in that next class meeting on all the possible ways one could outline an MPT post-reading and pre-writing one. Still gonna take care of birds, plural.
- I conditioned further deep dives on engagement from students in my section (and other sections, who also have access). While the deep dive would be worth it in the technical sense if even one person thought it was useful, that wouldn’t mean it was the best return on investment of limited time and energy (on my end) and attention span (on their end) if I kept creating further ones that no one watched. Drawing on another tool in our ASP toolbox, since the session was recorded in Zoom, we can track how many student views it garnered.
I promise to report back on how this all goes. I am cautiously hopeful I’ve walked the fine line between harnessing new energy and setting up appropriate logistical and statistical boundaries, while deploying an initiative responsive to students’ expressed concerns and observed challenges. May we all try to consciously tackle that balance at least once in this new academic year.
(Shane Dizon)
