You must have been trying to teach us something in the way you conducted class, but I’m not sure what that was. We spent, on average, less than an hour a day on the Federal Rules of Evidence. We spent very little time going over what makes evidence relevant or logical, persuasive or prejudicial. As the multiple-choice questions show, there are nuances to the FRE. If we are going to master the rules, we should first know what they mean, and how they have been applied. You encouraged us to work through the problems in the book, but by not spending more time going over the problems in class, we were just as likely to reinforce our misunderstandings as we were to master the rules. We learned to be skeptical of the rules without really learning the rules.

You were trying to teach us about persuasion and storytelling with the projects. Presumably, spending time on real cases, engaged in real storytelling, will teach us more about evidence than just memorizing some rules. But we never got to learn from our projects. We didn’t learn about the rules, because most of our projects didn’t concern them. We didn’t learn about storytelling or persuasion, either, because we got no constructive feedback on our projects. We’ll never know if we were persuasive, or why. We’ll never learn from our mistakes or successes with the projects, because no one will show them to us.

You also must have intended some lesson to be learned from the lack of a syllabus, assigned readings, and a meaningless final exam, but this one stumps me too. Maybe you were just teaching us not to blindly follow The System, or to think "outside the box." Maybe you were trying to teach us that grades are not a substitute for comprehension. Maybe you were teaching us to be self-sufficient, to take it upon ourselves to learn the material with as little guidance or structure as possible. It’s true that, in the real world of practicing law, no one will tell us how to structure our cases, and no one will gives us A’s for effort. When we practice law, we will be doing so largely solo. To some extent, we should wean ourselves of the structure and reassurance of syllabi, assigned readings, and final exams.

The problem with these lessons is that we already know them. The only things we get from the lack of a syllabus, assigned readings, or a meaningful final exam is extra anxiety and a grade that, despite having very real consequences on our careers, will have absolutely no relation to our understanding of evidence law. The lesson of independence is generally worthwhile, but it wasn’t worth what it actually cost us this winter.