Law students when they start law school may be adjusting to a new city, new friends, a new school, a new field, and a new way of studying. The first year of law school is tough for everyone, even for all of the gunners in your class. So your best way to keep all of the emotional noise of the gunner out is to ignore them.
What is a gunner? A gunner is a person who is competitive, overly-ambitious and substantially exceeds minimum requirements. A gunner will compromise his/her peer relationships and/or reputation among peers in order to obtain recognition and praise from his/her superiors.
Gunners may be the first ones to raise their hands, offer an answer, and use big words. They often seem like they know what they are doing in law school. However, gunners also spend all day trying to understand a rule, only to realize that the case it came out of has been overturned. They can still get anxious and worry about not doing well on the exam. Yes, they are people just like you.
So do not be afraid and do not be discouraged. You will try your best and still get an answer wrong in class. Just learn from your mistakes. Suppose you prepare for your class for hours, you may be able to answer all the other questions that the other students are getting, and even better than those students. Then your professor calls on you for some other problem that you could not have prepared for before class. It happens and it will happen to everyone at some point! Do not fret.
Your professor will finally realize that you are struggling with your answer, but is pleased that you stayed on point and managed some response. And guess what?! Your professor probably called on you to see you struggle with the question, so that the class could learn from your mistakes. This is their job as a professor.
And once a gunner does a practice exam, he or she quickly realizes that showing off in class is not the only thing that they will have to do to get a good grade in the course. And then the gunner must spend hours with the reading, trying to wrap their head around the rules, the exceptions, and the exceptions to the exceptions.
As a first year law student, many of the same frustrations and anxieties will also arise for you, just like the ostentatious gunner. So refine your skills by learning the rules and doing practice exams with LST – Law School Tutor. This means acknowledging over and over that what you wrote before was not right. And it is perfectly normal to be upset that you are not a master of all of your law school exams right away.
So do not get down on yourself. A gunner is dealing with the same issues you are, but they just express it differently.
LST – Law School Tutor assists students in achieving high grades during law school, in order to ensure that they have better academic opportunities during law school and better job opportunities after law school.
For more information, please contact LST at info@law-school-tutor.com