Con Law is not about Conning people!

I am going to warn everyone right now, this is going to be a long post. To start off I wanted to get a little deep though. I was a little bummed out after last semester, it was hard to come back to school after having such a fun time with the fam. Plus, I had not gotten the grades I thought I had worked hard enough to get. To put it succinctly, I was bummed out and not really ready to face another tough semester. I also had more class hours and the classes seemed harder. I know. Wo is me. Anyway, the philosophical part of this post is an idea about choices. If you are religious you might call it agency, anyway you look at it, however, it comes down to making choices. This life is full of choices, you cannot avoid them. As Geddy Lee of the Popular rock trio Rush put it "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" (thanks for the quote Puls).
The thing that we need to remember about choices is that we need to make the difficult ones and stick to them. I feel like I have been turning a corner in my life recently and this has helped me to see why. Sometime we don't want to make difficult choices, so we decide to just kind of let our life slide by easy. If we do that, however, we are missing the chance to change our lives for the better.
I remember in ninth grade I made a conscious decision to be more outgoing and to say the things that I thought were funny out loud. That has helped me to be more of a people person and to show my personality when I first meet people. All from virtually one choice. While there are some things that we have no control over, we can control certain things. Our attitude for one, and our work ethic and our personal relationships. If we want to be happy we need to make that choice, and make the changes that will make that choice possible. That is the other thing about choice, once we make a choice we need to do the things that make it possible. Works, works, works.
OK, this was leading up to something and here it is. In order to fix my attitude this semester I decided to make a few choices. I started with normal things, get enough sleep, eat healthier, and exercise regularly. That took care of the physical, and it has helped my mood. I also made sure I was spiritually healthy. Finally I focused on school. I took a new class to help me with the day-to-day skills of law school and talked to some people to learn what I could do to improve. Trust me, I do not like to ask for help, but once I made the decision to do whatever I could to improve, I did it. I started typing my notes and am still looking for ways to improve.
Now the real reason for this huge post.
So school has been better the last couple of weeks, but my Con Law (Constitutional Law) class has been really tough, the professor is hard, the material is hard, and it is early in the morning. Needless to say it was my hardest class. After class on Monday, when I felt like I understood less after the lecture than before, I made a decision. I decided that even though it might take me significantly more time, I was going to outline my reading and do whatever I could to understand and be successful in that class. So Tuesday I outlined the class, and Wednesday I went in prepared. I don't know if it was inspiration, but I got cold called in Con Law. This means the Professor calls on you without warning, in my hardest class, which I had felt absolutely lost in everyday. I was prepared, however, but the question was from the last class' reading, I answered it poorly, but adequately I guess. I had done all that work and it hadn't helped. I was actually hoping he would come back to me. Of course, this is my hardest class, so he came back to me. I totally killed it. It was awesome. I owned the case, every question he had I owned it. I felt so good, my outlining not only helped me to understand the material but it helped me when I got Socratically bludgeoned in class. Like ten people actually complimented me on how well I had answered the questions. My choice really paid off big time, and quickly. I actually have been having a really good week this week. I also got cold called in two other classes on Monday and Tuesday too. It's like a joke in my section how I have been called on so much lately. It's all good though, don't worry Tracy, I'm actually starting to enjoy it, and I have been making more comments in class too, so I know I am understanding more.
So the moral of this story? Keep it real and make the choices you need to to be who you want to be and to be successful.
Peace.