hurrah for validation

One of the things that first year law students are repeatedly told is that they Must Outline. We hear whispers of the nasty fate of those students who didn't outline. I hear some of them vaporized into tiny little pieces of shimmery dust in their seats during the exam. Those who only outlined a little bit were felled by wild, law-student-eating hyenas that picked them out of the crowd as they left the exam room.

Accordingly, not wanting to turn into dust or be eaten by hyenas, we all create these outlines of varying lengths for each course. There is palpable fear of those who have 90-page outlines and secret relief when somebody admits that their outline is bare-bones as well.

Me being the mildly compulsive type that I am, I started outlining at the end of September and have worked on them regularly since then. Thankfully, they are now almost done. They are quite detailed, mostly because I am fairly obsessive about details. They are thirty to fifty pages each, of questionable organization. I'm not exactly an innate outliner.

But, at the back of my mind, I always worried that I was wasting time. My friend D. summed it up when he sighed, "I dunno... it just feels like busywork."

Yesterday I took one of Prof. Contract's old exams. Today I went over the answers with him and my friend S., who also took the exam.

The incredibly validating result? I spotted all of the correct issues on the questions that covered what I'd outlined! The only major one I missed was from the last two weeks of class, which I haven't outlined yet.

Now I'm all fired up to finish these babies.