Pigs and Acorns

This is how we spend a chunk of class time everyday:

Professor’s provide hypothetical situations (hypos) and then ask questions about them. But they ask a specific student to answer the question. There’s only one possibility of this going well. The student has to be

1. Well prepared – read and studied all class material AND


2. Intelligent – or at least thoughtful enough to apply the material to a new set of circumstances AND

The professor must also decide not to stick with the person too long.

There are about twenty ways that this can go wrong. Simply, you can have a brilliant student, who just doesn’t know the material well enough to contort it and apply it to the hypo. Or maybe the guy has studied his ass off, but he just can’t walk up the spiral staircase without a light on. I only wish these were the most common ways that it goes wrong. More likely, the guy is surfing the internet and doesn’t even hear the hypo and has to guess. Even more likely, he will guess wrong and then the professor will allow him to go down the wrong path for five or ten minutes until it is so painfully obvious that the class is laughing at the outrageous far reaching implications of the student’s original answer. Sometimes, the professor will just keep going and going until it is clear that there is no right answer. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to say in that situation, but this week one student said, “That’s a good question” which seemed like a reasonable response to me, but the professor shot back, “Thank you. Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.” This of course brought on a bought of laughter. So I guess we laugh a lot in law school, especially in contracts, but I’m not sure that we aren’t laughing at ourselves and each other.

Really I just wrote this whole blog so that I could share the “Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then” statement. But I think I worked it in quite well. Picture above is of my contracts class. I am going to try to recommit myself to daily blogging even if it’s short.