Welcome to LearnLawBetter.
Today we are going to discuss the Dale Corson technique for helping you master difficult
reading material.
Stay to the end and learn how 15 minutes will help you understand better, and reduce your
stress levels.
Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today I want to share with you the study technique developed
by Dale Corson, the 8th president of Cornell University.
After my first year of law school, I enrolled in an Accounting 101 class at the local community
college, hoping that it would help me with the tax class I was going to take in my 2L
year.
I had no idea that Accounting 101 would end up being the most difficult course of my entire
academic career.
I spent hours working through the problems, but eventually needed help from the professor.
My meetings with Professor Palgutta were relatively short because I tried to figure out the problems
on my own, but at some point I knew I needed an expert to guide me through my conceptual
difficulties.
By the way, in case you are wondering, that course was not useful for my tax class in any way.
Now, just like me, you also encounter difficult material.
When that happens, place a small “s” in the margin of each paragraph that you are
struggling with.
The letter “s” represents the word “struggling.”
As you know, the next paragraph or two will often contain the answer to your question,
so that prior “s” becomes irrelevant and you can keep moving on.
But depending on what you are reading, you may find that you have a page or two
of “s’s" in a row. Now to be successful, you first have to struggle with the
material before asking someone for help.
Too many people stop thinking about the material because they get frustrated—they just want
someone to give them the answer.
Big mistake.
When you reach this point of wanting to give up, this is when the 15 minute solution comes
into play.
Grab a piece of paper and a timer, and set the it for 15 minutes.
You are going to give yourself 15 more minutes to try to solve the problem, and then do your
best in working through it in that 15 minutes.
Now some of you are asking, why would I do that? I just spent 20, 30, 40 minutes trying to
solve the problem and I didn't get an answer.
There are two reasons.
One, you have just given yourself permission to stop working on the difficult reading in
15 minutes.
Often, that by itself is enough to help you relax enough to figure it out on your own.
The second reason involves that blank piece of paper that I talked about.
Go back to the reading, to the point where you started writing the letter “s."
That's where you are going to begin this exercise.
During these 15 minutes you are going to write down lots of copious notes.
You want to explain what doesn’t make sense in the reading.
What exactly is causing your confusion?
You'll will take down those notes for 15 minutes, and then stop.
If you figured out, through taking notes, then great—you did it on your own.
But if not, this is the point where you need help.
Thankfully, you now have 15 minutes’ worth of notes to take to a professor, private tutor,
or your study group.
As a professor, I am always more sympathetic to a student that has done the hard work versus
the student that just comes and says, hey can you just tell me everything we covered in class yesterday.
By the way, the student that does the hard work first, will master the material in a
way that the student who is given the answer is never going to master the material.
If you want to become a stronger student you have to do the hard work.
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