Toby’s blog

Vanessa Friedman, on preparing for a singular experience: Professor Elizabeth Warren’s Contracts class:

“You might think a 10:30 class Monday morning is convenient because it means a chance to catch up on sleep missed Saturday night (when you were up late studying, of course). Not so when it’s a 10:30 Contracts class with Professor Warren. The timing is helpful – life-saving, actually – because it means a chance to meet with friends at the Hark to discuss the day’s cases, argue over the relevant issues, and laugh at each other’s attempts to predict what Professor Warren might pull out of each opinion. You laugh because no matter what you come up with, you will never be fully prepared for this class. When Professor Warren works her magic, the best you can hope for is to stay focused and have something on point (and to the point) to say when your name is called. And you laugh because you know that most of the time you will be wrong, or at best, close.

“At the beginning of the semester, hearing my name in this class was terrifying. I recognized myself in my classmates’ reactions: when someone was called on in the midst of frantic note-taking, his head popped up and he stared blankly at the professor for a moment before the fear set in and he would attempt a coherent answer. One of my friends had nightmares about this moment. But we could laugh because we were all in this together. This has been the most unexpected thing about HLS for me – it is an incredibly supportive and cooperative place.

“Even as each of us is humbled daily by our amazing professors, we all gain confidence from them and each other. When Professor Warren zeroes in on a particular student, you can see his classmates on either side mouthing suggestions and nudging their notes closer to the current target. And when she has moved on, there are sympathetic smiles or looks of congratulation (depending on how the answer was received) from around the room. And as the semester progressed, as Professor Warren taught us how to evaluate cases and pushed us to refine our answers and think on the spot, we all started to see the method in the madness. Professor Warren was not only teaching us to think and speak, she had compelled us to work together, rather than against each other.

“As we learned these skills and began to realize that almost everyone else felt similarly anxious, and that Professor Warren was actually on our side, trying to help us improve, class seemed less terrifying and became just an incredibly interesting and challenging experience. So although our predictions about class did not actually become more accurate, this was never the point. The goal was the process itself – to get us to push each other and engage in this place outside of class, even first thing Monday morning.”