Butt kicked and then studied and kicked butt on Wills, Trusts & Estates Barbri lecture.

Almost falling asleep after a LONG two days of intensive study, I'm proud of my accomplishment.

I spent the past two days learning Wills & Trusts. The first day kicked my butt. I showed up to class after doing the readings, but the professor's style was to go over one hypothetical after another after another for HOURS, expecting us to understand rules from the results of who wins and who loses in each scenario.

This was TOTALLY against my learning style. Like the first few days of this bar review, and like my first successful bar review in Colorado, I did will sitting by my laptop and typing in and memorizing rules as the lecturer dictated them to us. This was impossible when we were trying to figure out who takes under the will, and who improperly destroyed their will, etc. This was quite frustrating.

So after class yesterday, I sat down and reviewed EACH AND EVERY HYPOTHETICAL. I extracted the rules from the result, and I wrote the rules in my word processor in a BLACK LETTER LAW "RULE" format. It took me so many hours that by the time I was not even finished studying, the evening Barbri class video started and I was still in my seat from the morning live lecture.

When I got home, I decided that I wasn't going to let this SOB law professor make us look stupid again. I went through the books, did the readings as I did last time, but this time I REVIEWED EACH AND EVERY HYPOTHETICAL and where I could (many I couldn't because there were fill-in-the-blanks, Barbri's special style of lecture learning), I extracted and wrote up the black letter rules from the hypotheticals so that when I showed up to class today, I already had the rules and I could focus on the application of the rules in the hypotheticals. Victory. I understood everything the lecturer said, and while I still think he's an a*hole for writing his notes in this fashion, I still mastered the material on my own terms.

Tomorrow is Torts, an MBE topic. I'm excited about this because the notes I have from my Colorado bar review will be more than sufficient to prepare me for the MBE portion on this exam. I've ripped out the notes from the Barbri lecture handbook and even though I have the notes already written out from last time, I'll still play their fill-in-the-blank game. However, I don't think that transcribing all those notes on my computer will be worth my time as it was for these past few Wills & Trusts lectures. The rules on the fill-in-the-blank page seem to be quite straightforward. I'll just remember to write neatly so I can review my notes later on. If I have the time, the motivation or the energy, maybe I'll write them.

On another note, on my downtime I've been playing a really wacky and yet fun game, WORLD OF GOO. A demo is downloadable on their web site, and it's certainly worth the money. I'm having a wonderful time with it; I played it late last night before I went to sleep, and just like the goo-based structures you build in the game wobble, my eyes were wobbling when I went to sleep (and thus the room appeared to be wobbling), an interesting effect of the game. Funny enough, I experienced the wobbling randomly today after thinking about the game during the bar review today. I thought that was a strange recall kind of experience.

On a final note, some time ago, I purchased Centerpointe's Holosync Awakening course and Monroe Institute's Hemisync course which I now have backed up on a .flac format which my wife's Samsung YP-S3 music player doesn't play. So I bought myself today a SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8GB MP3 Player which can play my .flac files so that I can listen to them with headphones on my mp3 player and maybe I can fall asleep with them over my ears and get some sleep programming. I used to do that with my iPod mini mp3 player with Rockbox firmware installed, but I dropped that over a year ago and I haven't been able to listen to my files since. (I'd listen to it on my laptop, but the last thing I need is to fall asleep while listening to the audios and to roll over and crack my laptop's LCD screen. So I'm very excited that I'll be able to get back into listening to holosync and hemisync CDs.