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Comment by Rainymood | Hacker News Reader

>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally.

More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>.

I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.

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> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

This is the problem.

Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast.

Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years.

Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding.

Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.

If I'd known to do that, I might have made my way through my EE degree instead of dropping out to the (easier) CS degree. 90% of the time I got about 40-50% of the way through transcribing the stuff on the board before the lecturer erased it because 'fuck you, you had 30 seconds'

Ditto, EE too. I bought a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun just for the great table of Laplace Transforms.

If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.

Ridiculous. You're forcing your own preferences and quirks onto a class-full of students. They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best. As we can see from this very article what works for some does not match what works for you.

> They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best

They can, but do they ?

Given my experience as a student in the US long time ago, it rarely seemed so. I am all for treating them as adults as long as its not disturbing/distracting others in the class.

Then you'd be a terrible professor, because that attitude is not pro-learning. Students take their own notes because writing is an aid to memory. Students take electronic notes because those notes are easier to organise, edit, and search through. Many "decent" professors will not hand out notes, and the writings they put on the projector might be scanned and put online, but those writings have none of the benefits of actually typeset notes. Moreover, since you would ban electronics, students couldn't access those scans in a later lecture anyways.

You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

The act of writing them actually helps one to remember -- I never went back and organized, edited, or searched through notes I took, because I remembered most of the material, and what I didn't was in the book.

>You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

They also used to write cuneiform :p What's your point here?

>The act of writing them actually helps one to remember

Source for this, in comparison to typing?

It’s been widely reported for several years. Here’s the first link I found.

www.medicaldaily.com/why-using-pen-and-paper-not-laptops-boosts-memory-writing-notes-helps-recall-concepts-ability-268770%3famp=1

Well, I gave up entirely on taking notes in high-school because laptops weren't allowed, and I can barely read my handwriting if I'm quickly taking notes. Whereas in uni I actually used my notes, and have even referred to them years later since they're actually readable and useful. Granted, I would have them 1/2 typed while reading the material before lecture and did a final-draft cleanup after lecture, but typed notes were far more helpful than handwritten notes.

Assuming that everyone learns the same way you do is just false. Some people really like mind maps, I don't find them personally helpful but I don't tell people it's a useless technique or that they're wrong. If a student can't be trusted to have a laptop without spending the lecture browsing Facebook, then why should the lecturer care? That student is only hurting their own academic performance, it shouldn't stop others from being able to learn in a manner that benefits themselves.

Have you ever sat in the back row of a lecture hall and watched what the students are doing on their laptops?

What does that have to do with anything?

A lot.

Laptops are generally disruptive to the entire class, and (anecdotally, but I’ve done a lot of higher learning) almost all of their use is not for note taking or anything related to the class.

So why not ban them? Many professors do.

>So why not ban them?

Because some students are using them to take notes, and banning electronics harms the learning of those students.

They are distracting other students using a computer. Why do you want to ban using a computer but keep permitting distracting other students?

So when you get to the real world and everyone in the meeting is on their laptop? ...

Doesn't work that way in a lot of the real world.

Yep, I’ll be just like this guy.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...

> >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.

I can understand why people don't do it. We weren't taught how to learn at school or college and when we turned up at university we were expected to know how. It took me a semester of alcohol fuelled hedonism, followed by screwing up, panic, then introspection to work it all out.

I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way.

My eldest wants to be a doctor so I've tried to share as much of my experience with her on how to learn so she doesn't have to make my mistakes as they still don't teach them any of this today, at least in the UK.

This is exactly what I have observed among today's students also, and I am desperately trying to help! Smart students actually get hit harder because they cruise through high school and hit the wall in college. Then they may have a seminar or something on how to take notes and basic time-management (usually delivered through a first-year experience program or something similar), but if they want a real understanding of how to learn they have to get it on their own.

I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying that they are not going to do it, the majority at least. Most people take the path of least resistance, if your path of least resistance is retyping your notes consistently every class more power to you, you are not an average student then. I never typed up my notes, I made flashcards based off them which worked for me, but OK. I'm just saying that if you think the average student diligently types up his notes after every class you're sorely mistaken.

This method of writing notes still seems like a downgrade from using a pen - my optimal way of taking notes would be with a pen, but with some sort of handwriting recognition on a tablet so it could immediately translate it to prose + LaTeX mathematics. Something that does both nicely seems difficult to find though...

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

If that is the case, then I fear little from the upcoming students chomping at my old ankles in the jobs market!

Transcribing my lecture scribbles to neater notes later in the day (or sometimes later in the week depending on scheduling) was important in solidifying the knowledge or, more importantly, realising that something hadn't twigged in my head as I thought it had (giving me chance to look up the matter and/or ask the lecturer for clarification next time, instead of being surprised by not understanding when new information was built on that part or it came up in an exam).

My handwriting is terrible,and worse when it comes writing down formulas, this could be a useful way of writing up notes a lot quicker. Also useful for cheat sheets or summarising notes

My handwriting is also awful, but what the parent suggested isn't at all incompatible with taking typed notes: I would type a first draft while reading the material before lecture, add during the lecture, then finish the final draft afterwards. I regret I didn't learn this method of note-taking earlier, and it works for both hand-written and typed. It also doesn't take that much time, but the last step of reviewing and cleanup is critical for actually cementing my understanding of the material.

Another possible method would be taking written notes during lectures, then typesetting them afterwards. However, I found it was preferable to revise my notes soon after the lecture, at least 1-2 days following, while my memory was still fresh.

I have no objection to taking quick notes in lectures using electronic means instead of pen+paper (though the latter would still be my preference).

It was the implication that people don't have and won't make time to review, tidy, and, where relevant, expand upon or question those notes afterwards, that I was responding to.

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