I am bewildered by how some students approach their commercial bar prep class. After paying a chunk of money for the class, going through three years of law school, and staking their personal futures on the idea of being employed as a lawyer, some students still fail to do everything the class tells them to do, fail to listen to lectures, fail to attend live classes, and fail to take advantage of practice opportunities. Even if they do follow along with the class, they take advantage of the class's electronic features by running the lectures at 2 or 3 times speed or skipping sections.
For years, I've been trying to figure out the cause of this behavior, hoping that I could stop it. For some of them, I suppose there might be depressive burnout and life events and students who didn't really want to be lawyers in the first place, so maybe there's not much that can be done there. But for the rest of them who don't have an excuse like this, one would think that after all that time, money, and effort, that they'd be all over bar prep. However, more often than I would like, this isn't the case.
So what is going on? Ignoring the style of education most of our students receive in high school and college, I think a big part of the issue is the technological time we live in. Everything is easy, and instantaneous. On top of this, a large majority of students today grew up in a fairly consequence-free environment where everyone got a trophy and helicopter parents took care of their problems (as a side note, I never worry about college athletes, because they've already learned that not everything should be easy and that you can try "really, really" hard, but that's not going to guarantee you anything).
Basically, I think technology has taught all of us that things can and should be easy and we shouldn't worry too much about keeping things in our heads or the consequences of failing to do so. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, even though I am, in the recent assessment of a 7th Grade cheerleader, an "old, fat, bald guy." I have all my bills paid electronically. I know no one's actual phone number or email (they are all automatically stored on my devices). I don't have a map in my car and have only a weak understanding of the street names around here even after 5 years in Columbia. I can only imagine what I might have been like growing up with a lifetime of Googles and cell phones. The other day, I told my kids a story about desperately trying to find a certain club when we were trapped in downtown Houston after a Pixies show. By the look in their eyes, I could have been explaining to them how I witnessed the invention of fire. They couldn't figure out why I just didn't look it up on my phone. I had to explain that this was 1989.
If the problem is culture and technology, I suppose the question is what to do about it. As of now, legal educators and companies seem to be going with the "easy, 24-hours, fun flow" model that most of society operates on. There's games to help a student learn the law. There's online programs that help with briefing cases, spaced repetition, note-taking, keeping focus by locking a student out of fun websites, lectures on demand, etc., etc. However, bar pass rates continue to slip, so all of this ingenuity and personalized ease of use doesn't seem to be helping that much.
The easy-squeezy tech world genie is out of the bottle. The question is, would law students be better off if educators tried to fight against the current flow of technology, or would that simply wash students away? (Alex Ruskell)
