Professor Marian

Let me introduce you to Prof. Marian. She is supposedly one of the foremost experts in her field, which happens to be a field in which I am quite interested. Therefore, I was extremely excited that I garnered a spot in her class this fall.

The first day of class I stubbornly clung to that enthusiasm in the face of all reason to feel otherwise.

I’ve chosen to call her Prof. Marian because she looks like the stereotypical spinster librarian. She wears her hair in a headband and usually a cardigan sweater over a dress. Her horn-rimmed glasses might look funky on a woman 40 years younger, but on her they just make her eyes seem constantly glazed. Her expression never varies from a semi-vacant smile that is made all the more surreal by her high, breathy voice.

Our texts for the course include a casebook that we never actually read (but that cost me $90 to buy) and a slim paperback full of excerpts from her published works. We’ve read most of that book over the last five weeks. She makes sure to drop the names of at least one French and numerous German philosophers per hour—and always carefully pronounces the names with an exaggerated and carefully enunciated French/ German accent. Judging by her written work and some comments that she has made in class, I am fairly certain that she speaks fluent German (maybe French, too). Normally this would make me automatically sympathetic to her. But she mishandles the language. In the slim paperback, her writing is peppered with instances where she randomly hyphenates or splits the long compound nouns so common in German. One or two such mistakes could be filed under missed editing. But there are so many that I find myself nearly overcome with the urge to take a red pen and mark up the book and return it to her.

All of this would be nitpicking, and I would file it in the dark corner of my mind where you put the thoughts that you know are unreasonable or crazy and never let them see the light of day, except for the fact that her lectures are *exactly* like that. She randomly harps on this point or that, glosses over other points, gets wrapped up in a rhapsodic elucidation of some obscure French legal scholar’s theories that (by the way) have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and generally enjoys herself thoroughly while leaving the class in a catatonic state. It’s pure torture. One of my friends was smart and dropped it after the first day. Me, I kept telling myself that it would get better once we got out of the pure theoretical section. But now it looks as though the theory will NEVER END.

I would love to think that things will improve. I keep hoping that things will improve. But we’re five weeks in and there’s no sign that anything will ever change. I’m not sure that I’ve actually taken any notes in her class in the last two weeks. If I have, it’s been purely accidental and will likely be of no real use in taking the exam. This subject is not one that I’m likely to find a hornbook or outline for, so I’m sunk. Dear Lord, why must law school be so useless?