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Comment by mo_42 | Hacker News Reader

When I was studying, I sometimes saw classmates typing the lecture directly in LaTeX. To me, they always seemed very busy and a little stressed. Also, it seemed that learning and understanding wasn't their primary goal rather than having beautiful lecture notes.

I would have liked to have a tabled with a nicely working pen. But good old paper and pencil also did the job. Some professors even recommend not taking notes at all but rather preparing the lecture. Then, attending it by primarily listening and trying to understand and then working on the homework.

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> Some professors even recommend not taking notes at all but rather preparing the lecture. Then, attending it by primarily listening and trying to understand and then working on the homework.

Some of my professors leveraged MOOCs (massive open online courses) and "inverted" their classes: they recorded a video of them giving the class, and asked the students to watch it before the class. During the class, the teachers would be here to answer questions and go deeper into the material.

I loved it, because I could watch the video at my speed (with as many interruptions as I wanted).

That's pretty awesome -- it's like breakout sessions after a normal lecture, but with grad students replaced by the professor.

The "inverted-online-lecture-followed-by-guided-work-in-class" is the method that Salman Khan of Khan Academy fame pioneered. This was the first time technology was truly leveraged to make a leap in instruction efficiency. Salman Khan has several talks on this topic.

Sal Khan, who started Khan Academy in 2006, was a relative latecomer: "Flipping the classroom" was pioneered in part in the 1990s by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur — and Dr. Mazur has said that it's a variation of law-school Socratic method that's been around (with pre-class reading instead of video) since the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

The issue is, if you miss a point at the beginning of the lecture, you can't ask a question, you'll have to wait for the live session to do so. This impacts the topic and remainder of the video

Nothing's perfect, but an email to the prof should alleviate some of that problem.

> you can't ask a question, you'll have to wait for the live session to do so.

Or check on one of the gazillion resources you have in 2024.

The whole idea is that instead of having the teacher spend their time teaching the basics (which they can record once and let you watch together with all the resources you have), they spend time exclusively talking with the students.

In the end, the students have a lot more time to ask questions to the teacher, and they don't have to feel stupid asking them because they have actually studied before.

> Also, it seemed that learning and understanding wasn't their primary goal rather than having beautiful lecture notes.

Bingo.

I commented the same thing and someone else even suggested solving exercises in latex. Wtf what's wrong with people here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39260895

But I once has a math student in my physics class who prefer submitting her assignment typeset in LaTeX. I told her it’s up to her, but it wasn’t a requirement from us. She basically said it would be more difficult to do the assignment otherwise and she would prefer LaTeX instead.

To this day I still don’t understand how it would be easier,l. But I also seen some people prefer doing “analysis” by printing out a plot. To me that’s very inefficient and using interactive plots are much better. I guess the situation is similar, that the ways we think are so different that we can’t imagine how people doing it otherwise would be simpler / better in any way.

(You could imagine carrying the next step in a derivation can be much simpler as you can just duplicate the line and modify from there. Also macros can help. With enough abstraction it could be easier in some way.)

I used to submit math assignments in Word for Windows 2.0 (or 6.0, whichever was current in 1994) equation editor - i didn’t have access to a reasonable latex setup at the time.

The reason was that my handwriting was slow, messy and hard to read. Taking the effort to write a nice “submission” quality assignment would easily take two or three times as much as it would take me using Word.

Thanks for sharing, I haven't thought that could be a contributing factor too. And I appreciate your effort as a former grader—some of the hand writings are impossible to read and they don't seem to put an effort to make my life easier...

Yeah, I'm worse than average at multitasking and was never able to take notes without missing chunks of the lecture, let alone being able to think about what was said. I found the most effective approach for me was to read the chapter beforehand taking notes on anything I didn't completely understand. Then during the lecture just sit and listen, perhaps occasionally jotting something down that wasn't in the book, then asking questions if the lecture hadn't already answered them. Write summarizing notes was deferred until reviewing material in preparation for an exam, if done at all, using LaTeX if I thought it would be useful as a long-term reference, or paper if it was just to assist mental organization.

Ha, you are absolutely correct about that. I don't believe LaTeX was designed with speed in mind. I was even using Vim! I eventually realized that I was paying far more attention to my notes than the actual material, and began to just bring a notebook and a pen.

It feels like your understanding of a subject/concept goes through successive phases of refinement. The initial mental image may be too chaotic to be properly converted into latex. However, the final picture may be refined enough to be worth preserving using latex.

Because I always used to be self-conscious about the typing sounds in-lecture, I used to take hand-notes in class and then immediately after TeX them. While that had the happy accident of reinforcing the class notes, I find that having notes that are easily referenced and, in particular, CTRL+F'able was critical for exam prep.

I took notes by pen in my theoretical physics lectures and typed them up later in latex.

I was a lazy student and rarely did this but whenever I read ahead and took notes before going to class, it made the whole class really easy.

Shoulda done it for my entire educational career. But I had other plans.

This used to be me in grad school-- pen and paper for diagrams, vim for notes. I eventually moved to Markdown, using pen and paper more sparingly.

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