One Down, Two to Go

Well, my Torts final is done. Whew! Glad to have that one behind me. Everyone was pretty nervous about it, and the tension and stress in the air was palpable. Thanks for all your kind prayers and nice wishes. My next final is on Monday, and my last final is on Wednesday. In the meantime, I'll be doing lots of studying. And going to the laundromat. Sheesh, I'm running out of clean clothes!

The test was okay. It's difficult to explain what it's like to take a law school exam, so I'll just share one little story that's easy to understand. My exam today happened to have a few multiple choice questions, which is somewhat unusual for the format of these exams and extraordinarily unusual for my professor for this class, who has taught at my school for over 30 years and couldn't remember when/if he had done multiple choice questions in the past. Yikes...Anyway, there was one multiple choice question that was very short, and it referenced a case by name. I had made a chart of all of the cases we had read for the course (about 120, in case you were wondering) and which pages they were on so that I could quickly flip to them in the textbook if I needed them. I didn't remember the case name off the top of my head; in fact, the name wasn't familiar at all. So I looked on my chart, and shockingly, the case wasn't on my chart. I took a deep breath and tried to not panic. (As my cute nephews can tell you, panicking gets us nowhere.) I then looked in the table of cases (sort of like an index/table of contents thing in the textbook) for the name of the case. Crazily, the case wasn't in there, either. My heart was racing. There was a reason I couldn't remember the case--we hadn't read it! My mind was spinning: was it a case the professor had handed out in class? I flipped through my class handouts. Nothing even close to that name, but one thing with no name on it. Was that it? If it was, there wasn't enough information on it to answer the question. Judging from the multiple choice answers, I figured out the general topic that the case must have covered and flipped to that section in the textbook. There are lots of cases in that part of the book, and I flipped furiously through the pages, trying to find any reference in the pages in between cases or footnotes that might give me an insight into what the case was about. I was flipping and flipping aimlessly when I realized that I was getting frustrated and panicky, so I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and said a quick prayer. I had done my best to prepare, and here I was, unable to find a case. How could I answer the question without the case? I asked for help and clarity of mind to find the case and do my best, since I knew I had done all I could do to prepare. I took another deep breath and opened my eyes, still looking down at my hands. Then, as I slowly looked back up to my textbook, I saw the name of the case buried in a paragraph near the bottom of the page that my textbook was open to. It jumped right out at me. I was shocked, really. I'm still somewhat surprised I saw the name. It wasn't highlighted in my book or anything, and the professor had only mentioned it in passing as we were discussing the case that cited it. My textbook was open to the page where the language from the case I needed had been quoted.

I said a quick thank you for my little miracle, and got back to the rest of my test. Sometimes, we have to just close our eyes, recenter, and allow ourselves to see what's right in front of us.