Kumon people now...

When I was a much smaller law student, maybe nine years old, my mother enrolled me in Kumon, sort of the Scientology of mathematical tutoring regimes. That I'm now in law school instead of NASA is pretty telling as to how well it worked for me. My problem wasn't so much the Kumon "method," though, as it was the terrible, terrible graphics they always used; graphics whose unflinching badness distracted me from my numbers. Clearly, nothing's changed at Kumon: witness the fetal-alcohol effected smiley-face they use as the letter "O" in their logo. It makes the limbless blobs in the Zoloft commercials look positively chipper by comparison. The moral: I couldn't learn math because Kumon made a bad graphic design decision.

Fast forward sixteen years: I'm still a student, still doing my damndest to learn, and still my school insists on distracting me from my studies with this rough-looking logo. If you think it's not so bad, take a second look. It's as if a class of third graders decided to think of everything that reminded them of the law --an owl, a lady with a sword, a dove, a scale, a stack of books, ummm, bushes, ribbons and maybe a planet, yeah, a planet!-- and then scribbled them all together in a messy circle and called it a day.

It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have an enormous version of it hanging in the moot court room. It's gold colored, maybe eight feet tall, and it looks like it's made of recycled milk cartons. I know I'm going to be arguing my brief in that room this spring, and that ugly thing will be glinting at me the whole time. I'll have flashbacks of some Kumon franchisee rapping my knuckles with a ruler because I couldn't match the tiled numbers fast enough, and I'll fail the class. What I wouldn't do for a nice simple torch.