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Do you believe that you have all the answers?
Do you believe that your professor is a lousy teacher?
Learn why it is essential to have a teachable spirit, even when you believe your teacher
is wrong.
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Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today I want to discuss with you why you need a teachable spirit.
I’ve seen it over and over again.
Arrogant students who believe they know how to study and to take exams.
But most of these students don’t do as well as they thought they would, at which point
they blame the professor for bad exam questions, a forced curve that artificially kept their
grade down, or poor grading by the prof.
A few years ago I had a student who flunked one of my courses.
The student took my course a second time, and once again flunked it, even though I used
the same multiple choice questions from the prior exam.
Rather than accepting personal responsibility, this student blamed me for flunking the final.
You will never be as successful as you can be with this type of attitude.
So here's my recommendation: suspend your disbelief.
Its hard, but once you start you will begin improving, whether you are at the
top of your class or at the bottom.
This is how you do it.
You hear something from an expert, like your professor, and the advice contradicts what
you believe to be true.
The professor may be giving you advice that is contrary to what some upperclassman has
told you.
This is when you need to suspend your disbelief and trust your professor.
But you say, this upperclassman got the highest grade in the class last semester.
Or someone on the Internet said they nailed law school, getting almost all A’s.
Now, I don’t doubt that these students got top grades.
But let’s think critically about the inference you are being asked to make.
The argument goes something like this.
I got all “A’s” and if you follow what I did then you will also get all “A’s.”
But are you like that upperclassman or the person you saw on YouTube?
Do you have the same IQ, the same background, the same undergraduate GPA, the same experience?
Did you have the same professors?
Are your final exams similar to what that other person had?
There are many variables that go into someone getting the highest grade in a course, and
it is possible that you share none of those variables with that top student.
So take that anecdotal evidence with a grain of salt.
Let’s look at one variable for a second.
Some students come to law school with exceptionally strong technical writing skills.
That person will do better because they were trained to write better because they went
to a high school that taught technical writing, and then to a college with a strong emphasis
on essay exams.
Now I don’t know about your experience, but more and more students come to law school
without a strong writing background.
This means that the advice you receive from these “A” students won’t work for you
because you are starting at different places.
Another variable is undergraduate majors.
I've noticed that philosophy majors tend to do well in law school because their courses emphasize
the same critical reasoning skills needed to succeed in law school.
If the person giving you advice was trained in philosophy, that person’s advice may
not be of use to you.
Again, you are both starting at a different point along the path to an “A.”
You may have heard from others that you should not brief your cases, which I explain in another
episode is horrible advice.
You now have a decision to make: do you believe those other people that gave you that bad advice, or a
professor that has helped thousands of law students, and understands what it takes to
succeed.
Now I do believe that some people have succeeded without case briefing, but ask yourself, what
knowledge, skills, and abilities did they bring with them to law school, and do you
have the same knowledge, skills, and abilities?
To succeed in law school you need to suspend your disbelief and develop a teachable spirit.
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Thanks for watching.