DISCLAIMER: This post is in no way supposed to cause offence, I'm just really really curious!!!
Ok, so I read quite a few US blawgs and the ubiquituous outlining has come to my attention more than once.
I was intrigued. What is this "outlining" that everyone seems to know about? All the blawgs talk about it and people are constantly posting about doing their outlines and suchlike, so I decided to look deeper into it.
Buffalodawg was kind enough to tell me what it is. It's exactly what it says on the tin, an outline of all the course material. This disappointed me somewhat, I was convinced there was some secret study skill the US Law Students were privy to, that I am missing out on. So I delved deeper and found this. Basically it means making notes of all the material in one place. Lecture notes, case book notes, textbook notes, statutes etc.
This struck me as odd, this is what I would always do, take all my reading and stuff when i come to do revision and combine it all in one place. But it seems to be a unique method known only to law students, but surely not? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all up for the study skills but as graduate students, having been in education for a good few years by the time you start law school, have you not been doing this for years already?
There's got to be more to it, right? Like some kind of special method or something, it can't just mean "revision notes"? So, dear American colleagues, please please tell me what's the deal with the outlining, why is it such a big deal and is there some technique to it? Do you fail if you don't do it? I feel like it's possibly something I should be doing to do well in law school and would like to know what I'm missing out on :-(
Thanks muchly.
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4 comments:
I guess that would be the same as I do...make a 2 page summary (outline) on all the stuff learnt about a topic and use that to revise from when it comes to revision instead of doing all the reading again and getting bogged down in highlighting. Sounds a bit werid though. I've been summarising my seminars and lectures since I started...it's not new. Bloody Americans! Ha.
Miss H
Outlining is important in US law schools because the Socratic Method is intentionally confusing. Profs don't really lecture and put things in the right order for you. They just spend every class asking questions about cases. We need to outline in order to make sense of everything. A lot of times I don't really understand what is going on until I put it together in my outline. It is kind of like undoing the confusion caused by the professor.
Sounds great!
Miss H
There's also the fact that most American high school and college students are not used to having just one final exam at the end of a semester. I understand that it's different elsewhere in the big, wide world. Anyways, in law school we are shocked into that nasty reality, so it's a new trick to learn outlining. Other grad school programs aren't set up the same way, so it's kind of unique to us law school-ers.
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