BarBri and book-debinding.
May. 31st, 2009 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenAre you sick of Fanime-related posts yet? Unfortunately, the only other thing I have to offer is BarBri classes. This past week was the Multistate Preview -- take practice questions and then learn the substantive law by reviewing the answers. I'm not too worried about the Multistate portion of the exam. It's multiple choice, and I'm already doing around target level (65%), so I once I learn all the nitty gritty details of the law (and about mortgages), the section should be a good score-booster.
Tomorrow we start the regular program, which consists of straight-up substantive law lectures and homework of practice questions and whatnot. I've been trying to build up my discipline to follow the program and study when I'm at home, but it's been hard. Especially since I've wanted to do other things like post Fanime pictures, update my Hawaii Scrapblog (in anticipation of reprinting it because the first run from Shutterfly was too cropped for my liking), and catch up on the anime episodes that I missed during Fanime (ironic how that works). But I have started making flashcards for various random things that I think I need to know. I'm not going to outline; they may have paid off somewhat during law school, but the time versus return is not worth it.
One exciting thing I did related to BarBri was debind their in-class workbook. It's this massive thing that contains all the lecture handouts. I understand their desire to make things "foolproof", as in, always bring this book to class and you'll be good. (Except for the first week, when we used the Multistate Preview book.) But it is seriously huge, and chances are I'll be carrying around the Conviser Mini Review book everyday, too, so I decided I'd do like they said we could and just bring the relevant section each day. The book is perforated, but tearing out 1000 pages of their glossy cheap paper sounded like a nightmare -- I tore out the 7 answer forms for the Multistate Preview question sets, and that was annoying enough -- so I decided to debind the book using the ol' Tokyopop microwave trick.
I've never scanned manga before, but having been involved with scanlations so long and having entertained the idea now and then, of course I've heard of the various tricks like using a microwave or an iron. I decided to go with microwave, though since the BarBri book was about ten times as massive as a tankoubon, I was a little worried it wouldn't work. As it was, I think I probably had to get the pages hotter than usual to loosen the glue -- that or the cheap glossy paper just does that -- but it worked quite well.
Debinding isn't really foreign to law students either, I guess. I've known several people who debind their casebooks and put them in binders. That always felt a little sacrilegious to me, plus I like to try to resell my textbooks. If I have so many qualms about even highlighting them, how are you going to convince me to chop the spine off? But hey, I have to return the BarBri materials at the end anyway -- in any condition, but with the pages inside the appropriate covers -- so I might as well make my life easy. Plus, I don't think debinding casebooks is a do-it-yourself affair, at least not for most law students, but BarBri books are less durable.
8 more weeks until the bar!
[BTW, I'm going to keep using the "law school" tag for bar classes, because I consider it a part of law school, and I don't really want to create another tag for it. I think of it as 塾 (cram school) for law students, but the native-speakers on Lang-8 tried to correct my usage, so maybe the irony doesn't come across?]
Tomorrow we start the regular program, which consists of straight-up substantive law lectures and homework of practice questions and whatnot. I've been trying to build up my discipline to follow the program and study when I'm at home, but it's been hard. Especially since I've wanted to do other things like post Fanime pictures, update my Hawaii Scrapblog (in anticipation of reprinting it because the first run from Shutterfly was too cropped for my liking), and catch up on the anime episodes that I missed during Fanime (ironic how that works). But I have started making flashcards for various random things that I think I need to know. I'm not going to outline; they may have paid off somewhat during law school, but the time versus return is not worth it.
One exciting thing I did related to BarBri was debind their in-class workbook. It's this massive thing that contains all the lecture handouts. I understand their desire to make things "foolproof", as in, always bring this book to class and you'll be good. (Except for the first week, when we used the Multistate Preview book.) But it is seriously huge, and chances are I'll be carrying around the Conviser Mini Review book everyday, too, so I decided I'd do like they said we could and just bring the relevant section each day. The book is perforated, but tearing out 1000 pages of their glossy cheap paper sounded like a nightmare -- I tore out the 7 answer forms for the Multistate Preview question sets, and that was annoying enough -- so I decided to debind the book using the ol' Tokyopop microwave trick.
I've never scanned manga before, but having been involved with scanlations so long and having entertained the idea now and then, of course I've heard of the various tricks like using a microwave or an iron. I decided to go with microwave, though since the BarBri book was about ten times as massive as a tankoubon, I was a little worried it wouldn't work. As it was, I think I probably had to get the pages hotter than usual to loosen the glue -- that or the cheap glossy paper just does that -- but it worked quite well.
Debinding isn't really foreign to law students either, I guess. I've known several people who debind their casebooks and put them in binders. That always felt a little sacrilegious to me, plus I like to try to resell my textbooks. If I have so many qualms about even highlighting them, how are you going to convince me to chop the spine off? But hey, I have to return the BarBri materials at the end anyway -- in any condition, but with the pages inside the appropriate covers -- so I might as well make my life easy. Plus, I don't think debinding casebooks is a do-it-yourself affair, at least not for most law students, but BarBri books are less durable.
8 more weeks until the bar!
[BTW, I'm going to keep using the "law school" tag for bar classes, because I consider it a part of law school, and I don't really want to create another tag for it. I think of it as 塾 (cram school) for law students, but the native-speakers on Lang-8 tried to correct my usage, so maybe the irony doesn't come across?]
