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Comment by Clownshoesms | Hacker News Reader

I agree, this bit struck me:

"The key idea of taking good notes in class is to write down as much as possible."

I guess the post does mention to adapt strategies based on the teacher's style, but I found (some/most) lecturers I had were just speed-writing on the blackboards as fast as possible (95 perhaps?), in barely legible writing, while also explaining the concepts.

My calc & linear lecturers were like a weird, comical race where the lecturers were master speed-writers with a side of obfuscation, so not only couldn't I keep up sometimes with the notes, the actual verbal explanation/concepts were falling by the wayside.

As an aside I had this lady's father for calc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Crown_Princess_of_Denmar...

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This off-hand comment sent me on a hilarious wiki tangent.

At some point you'll be able to say your Calculus lecturer was the Queen's father. Just think how different his life would've been if his daughter didn't meet the Prince at the Slip Inn bar (you can't make this stuff up).

As an aside, he put an \inf on his coat of arms.

Not that I'm condoning the speed-teaching, but I find that writing down stuff helps me learn it in a qualitatively better way than just listening to it. It could be a left-brain kind of thing but it definitely trips some alternate pathways. I don't need a lecturer to do this necessarily but it's an effective if expensive forcing function.

I can very well imagine note-taking helps with memorization, but I can't imagine that it helps with concepts, with connection the dots. Your mind has to be able to wander freely for that, when you are busy writing you have to concentrate on that particular task, which is the opposite of a freely roaming mind ready to explore ideas and connections. Just my theory, and I'm certainly biased, since I'm someone who very rarely wrote anything down at university At school we had to, and looking back the results I got from that education support my theory. I never had any trouble at school, but getting good grades and actually caring about the knowledge and connecting it all in my head didn't happen - only now, decades later, when I discovered online learning and took over 70 courses by now am I able to connect it all in a meaningful way. No, I certainly don't have a good opinion about note-taking as a basis for gaining knowledge. The results are too narrow, I think.

What I found that helps - which unfortunately doesn't scale very well given how much students have to learn in a given time - is to teach others. Become a TA. Answer other people's questions, explain stuff. It may be an individual thing, I always work better that way in all parts of life - doing things other people need, I don't have a lot of questions myself and I do much better under this system.

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