1L year is over. That's first year law school, in nerd-talk legalese. I still can't quite believe I'm even in law school. I've been thinking a lot about it and trying to understand how I fit in (or don't, for that matter). Law school grades are 1 exam, all or nothing, at the end of the semester. I've always struggled with exams, standardized tests, and the traditional evaluation methods in our education system. My struggles and frustrations have only gotten worse as I get older; and, the law school system does not seem to agree with me. As I've wondered before, it makes me ask this question over and over: is something wrong with my brain? This is an analogy my understanding of how my brain processes information in law school. Maybe it's why I struggle to prove I have learned, maybe not. Comments welcome!
For a Cognitive Science class, I once wrote a research paper on pidgin languages, studying an overlapping area of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. I was interested in seeing if and what part of language is innate human instinct. The traditional view was that 2 languages mashed together to form a third language. ("Mashed" may or may not be the technical term.) But, this isn't true. What happens is that the native population and the immigrant population (e.g. native Haitians and French) simplify their languages so much that essentially they communicate non-verbally and with a shared vocabulary of maybe as little as 400 words. This isn't a "language," but, really, it's getting by with a totality of expressions. The first generation of children born AFTER the immigrants arrive are the ones who "sui generis" create a new language, apart from either the natives' or immigrants' languages. The parents don't teach it to the children, because they don't speak it. The older generation doesn't understand it, because it's communication between the children. So, I learned that the innate part of language are the things that make the children understand each other (syntax, grammatical structures, etc.) The "nature" part of language that is learned or experiential are the sounds and the semantics. Haitian creole sounds a bit like French not because they take words from French, but because the children heard those sounds and plugged them into/used them in the language structure they innately had in their brains. Now, what's really interesting, I think, is that if you look at the grammatical/verbal mistakes that children who speak modern languages that have been socially-evolved over hundreds of years, e.g. English, French, etc., then those mistakes match the grammatical structure of the pidgin languages that children create. What is "wrong" today in language is what is innately "right." So, to me, that means that the hardwired, innate language has changed so much from its natural original state, that now we shun the intuitive and "true" or "universal" part of language.
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How does this connect to how I feel about law school? Well, what is "wrong" today in law/social functioning is innately "right" in my brain. Where most people just accept the current laws and socially-evolved functioning, I do not. I cannot help but see the world as the originally intuitive way. I don't make assumptions and I can't easily accept or understand the socially-evolved rules by which society lives. So, everything I learn at school is a shock to me. The laws we learn are not intuitive to me. I have to struggle to see what is obvious to other people.
That was admittedly long, and probably confusing, but that's the best I can do to make sense of how I feel right now about law school, grades and that thing inside me I like to call my mushy brain.
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