Gunning with an AK-47

Every prospective law student has heard lore about "gunners " - even Wikipedia has an entertaining description. I kind of assumed that we'd have a good share of them here, since there are SO many uber-smart people - surely, *somebody* would want everyone else to know how smart he/she is, too.

In a way, though, there's an assumption that everyone here is pretty intelligent. So most people don't feel the need to show off. Some of the smartest people I know here don't talk in class. Ever. Last semester, with the exception of one or two people in two of my three larger (about 50-60 student) classes, everyone was pretty calm and reserved - saying things when they were important, but generally letting the professor guide the discussion. [The few exceptions, of course, were pretty blatantly obvious...and led everyone else to kind of snicker about those particular individuals' desire to hear themselves talk.] In general, I felt pretty lucky, though...nobody was a gunner to the point of driving me insane, and the professors managed class discussion well enough so that the same people didn't talk all the time.

This semester, things have changed for the worse. In one of my classes, there are 2 or 3 individuals that make probably 65-75% of the comments in class. And they're not particularly brilliant comments, either. They're often what everyone else is thinking, but everyone else doesn't feel the need to share with 80 other people. If they're not saying what everyone else is thinking, the likelihood of anyone else caring is (generously) slightly greater than zero, and the content of their comments ranges from delirious philosophical babbling to wacky hypotheticals.

As a result, I've pretty much stopped paying attention in this particular class. I sit waaaaay on the left side of the room, and since the professor doesn't cold call, there's no worry of needing to participate if I don't want to. I've admittedly already stopped doing all the reading (b/c, really, something's gotta give with my clinic work taking over my life)...and since it's a "black letter law" class, I can probably just relatively blow it off and study some hornbooks at the end of the semester and be fine. Obviously, this is where the "no grades" system here is a good thing - I'll take my "P" and move right along, thankyouverymuch.

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