Don’t give up on difficult reading! We’ve all been there! It’s 11:00 at night, you’re tired, you have been in classes all day, and now you have 50 pages of reading to get through before tomorrow. You find yourself struggling with understanding concepts within the material. Most law students, especially new law students, struggle with law school textbooks.
To be honest, a lot of lawyers sometimes struggle to get through wordy legal documents. This is why they employ associates and paralegals to do that kind of tedious work. But in law school, you can’t exactly hire someone to do your reading for you. This would be ineffective and a violation of a school’s honor code!
Dale Corson Method
So, what do you do? Dale Corson, the eighth president of Cornell University, developed a technique to help students not only get through difficult reading, but to also understand it. When you are having a hard time with a reading assignment, mark each paragraph that you don’t understand with a small “s” which stands for “struggling.” Many times, the next paragraph or two will help to clarify what you did not understand in a previous paragraph. However, if this is not the case, and you have a page or two of “s” paragraphs, you must first struggle to understand it on your own. This is vital! (For more information on pushing through when you just want to give up, watch my video on grit and motivation). Once you reach your breaking point of truly not being able to understand the material without help, follow these steps.
First
First, get paper, a pencil, and a timer. Set the timer for 15 minutes. During that 15 minutes, give it everything you’ve got to try to understand the material. This may seem like a pointless exercise because you have already hit that mental block where you feel like you just can’t get it. But there is a good reason to do this. You have given yourself permission to stop working on the problem at a definite time.
The fifteen minutes you set on the timer acts as a trigger to your brain to relax and often this will be enough for you to be able to figure it out.
Second
Second, during those fifteen minutes, go back to the first “s” that you marked in the material. Write down everything that you do not understand. What is it precisely that does not make sense? If you figure it out while you are writing these notes, great! But if after this exercise, something still does not make sense, then take it to your professor, private tutor, or study partner. You will have fifteen minutes worth of detailed notes to go over with that person. (Just as an aside, writing your notes, as opposed to typing them on a laptop, will vastly improve your note-taking abilities. See another episode of mine titled Handwrite or Type Notes
Many professors will have more sympathy for the student who has struggled with the difficult reading, over the student that just shows up at the professor’s office to ask him or her to explain a concept covered in class. Additionally, the student that uses this method will be in a much better position to understand the material because they worked so hard to understand it on their own before seeking help from anyone else. Finally, if you aren’t getting the help you need from your professor, you can always reach out to one of our tutors.
