For a long time, I thought my attention problem was a me problem. I'd sit down in intermediate accounting, and within ten minutes I was gone. Not because I was tired or on my phone. Nothing was sticking. The professor was talking, I was technically listening, and somehow none of it was landing.
What I eventually figured out had nothing to do with focus techniques or productivity hacks. It had to do with what my brain was doing before I even walked into the room.
The 20 Minutes That Changed Everything
At some point I started showing up to class early and doing something I'd never done before: I'd read through the day's topic for about 20 minutes, not trying to understand everything, just trying to get familiar with the vocabulary before someone started explaining it.
Nobody had ever told me to do this. I stumbled into it.
The difference in how I absorbed the lecture afterward was significant enough that I started doing it every single class. Not studying. Not taking notes. Just reading. Letting the terminology become less foreign before someone started speaking it at me.
What Was Actually Happening
Here's what I think was going on in my brain before I started doing this.
When a professor says "accumulated other comprehensive income" or "variable interest entity" for the first time, your brain has two choices: it can try to process the meaning of the phrase while simultaneously tracking the sentence it appears in, or it can quietly fall behind and let the rest of the lecture become noise.
For most of class, I was doing the second thing. The unfamiliar terms weren't just confusing. They were creating a chain reaction. Because I didn't have a mental model to attach the concept to, nothing subsequent built on anything. Each new idea was floating, disconnected, and my brain gave up trying to connect them.
The technical term for what was missing is a schema, the cognitive structure that lets you slot new information somewhere meaningful. When a schema doesn't exist, incoming information has nowhere to go. A 2024 review by Hattan, Alexander, and Lupo in Review of Educational Research documented this across decades of reading comprehension studies: activating what students already know before instruction consistently improves retention. Not because they're smarter, but because the brain is doing less work per concept.
The cognitive load research backs this up too. A 2020 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that students with more prior knowledge experience lower cognitive load, which frees up mental bandwidth for actually understanding rather than just parsing words. The catch, as Brod noted in a 2021 commentary in npj Science of Learning, is that the activated knowledge has to be relevant. Pre-reading the right material works. Skimming something unrelated doesn't move the needle.
What the 20 minutes of pre-reading was doing was building just enough schema that when the professor started talking, my brain had scaffolding. Familiar words meant I could focus on meaning, not translation.
Why Most Study Advice Misses This
The standard advice is to "review your notes after class." The problem with that is it assumes comprehension happened during class. For a lot of students in dense technical subjects like accounting, comprehension doesn't happen in the room. It happens in the hours of re-reading and re-explaining it to yourself afterward.
The feedback loop is backwards. You're correcting confusion that never needed to happen.
Pre-reading isn't glamorous and it doesn't feel like studying. There's no highlight to make, no flashcard to flip. But establishing familiar semantics before you walk into an explanation is, I'd argue, one of the most underrated study moves in any technical subject.
How This Became Part of What I'm Building
This experience was a significant part of why I built the language progression system in Coursity.
The core problem in most AI tutoring tools is that they either explain everything from scratch (slow, condescending if you have some foundation) or they assume you're already fluent in the subject (confusing if you're not). Neither maps to how learning actually works. You're always in a different place on different topics, and the explanation should meet you there.
Coursity's language progression tries to replicate what context priming does for lecture comprehension. Before introducing a new concept, the tutor starts from vocabulary and framing that you've already demonstrated familiarity with. If you've mastered how basic revenue recognition works, the explanation of a more complex revenue arrangement starts there, not from the ASC codification number.
The goal is that your brain always has a semantic foothold before it's asked to do the harder work of building on something new.
If You're Struggling to Pay Attention in Class
Try this: 20 minutes before the lecture, read through the chapter or module that's being covered. Don't take notes. Don't try to understand everything. Just let the vocabulary and the rough structure of the topic become familiar.
The science suggests this works because you're lowering the cognitive cost of processing new information. You're building the schema before you need it, rather than scrambling to construct it mid-explanation.
It won't fix everything. But if your attention issues in class look anything like mine did, where it felt like the lecture was happening just slightly outside of your comprehension, this is probably worth trying before you assume the problem is you.
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