Back to School

These days, it’s almost impossible to get a Snoopy lunch box with a working Thermos, no matter how hard you look. And with the ferocious enforcement of intellectual property rights, it’s simply too risky to buy one on eBay. Knock-offs abound.

So I go to school with food stuffed in a backpack. Or, when the bills are paid and there’s money in the bank, I eat in the cafeteria.

As I pick at my greasy fries and look around the room, I wonder, why bother being a law student on the wrong side of 50? People my age are supposed to be checking off the days to retirement. In fact, some of my high school friends are already voluntarily out of the workforce. Meanwhile, I’m paying tuition — a lot of tuition. I could seriously upgrade my car every year with the amount I spend on tuition.

The answer? I want to be a lawyer. I have wanted that for 40 years, but things just never worked out. In my teens, I hated high school. I went to four of them in four years and managed to squeeze out a Grade 13 diploma with a C average. That was enough to get me into the University of Western Ontario — but I could not afford to stay. So I took a year off, worked in a paper mill in northern Ontario, and saved enough money to go to Ryerson. At the end of my second year, people were offering me media jobs, and I took one.

Through my 20s, I wrote for the best newspapers in the country and I was able to cobble together a BA through correspondence courses. Law school was still out of reach, but grad school wasn’t. I got a master’s and a PhD without spending any of my own money. If anything, I came out ahead because I worked as a teaching assistant and both of my theses were published as books.

But I still wanted to be a lawyer. My wife had gone back to school in her early 40s and earned a law degree. She had articled at one of the big business firms and landed a job as corporate counsel to a federal agency. It wasn’t the job that made the experience so wonderful for her. She had been a champion negotiator in law school — yes, there is such a thing, and I think having a teenager honed her skills. She was also more confident and more aware of important issues and problems.

So I got the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) practice book. The LSAT is an evil thing. It tests reading comprehension (I was good at that), verbal logic (I was okay with that), and formal logic, which uses bizarre pattern games. I was terrible at formal logic.

You may have come across these games at some point. “Ten students ride a bus. Kathy will sit next to Jim but won’t sit next to Dave. Dave will sit next to Jack but won’t sit next to Abdul … Where will Larry sit?” That part of the LSAT is the thing that prevents many people from becoming lawyers. (Journalism school grads get, on average, the lowest LSAT marks. Philosophy majors score the highest.)

The first time I wrote the LSAT, I screwed up the computer