> you don't learn from it
Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.
Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.
Guess what he would ask about in the exams?
Not my experience.
> you can do it on autopilot
Huh, that sounds magically to me, I certainly can't. Actually taking notes down does the opposite, it forces you to get out of the autopilot, because you must think about the content.
Taking notes down, helps you learn better, because you use way more brain areas to process the information. Instead of just hearing, you need to hear it, understand it, try to rephrase it in your own words, use you motoric skills to write it down, and then see it and the placement of element on your page.
> we were given digital lecture notes anyway
Which you don't learn anything from, because by downloading you processed exactly none of the content yourself. Yeah they are way better to eventually search the information later on, if you already no the topic, but for learning you need to start with understanding it and structure it in your brain, which you would have already done for the first time, if you have taken notes.
> but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity
The necessity was created by the teachers in order to get the students to learn. It didn't fell down from the sky.
> Or summarising notes in your words.
Which is what you do, if you take down notes. And that on a real time loop, so you can't slack down or miss something, because the information won't come again.
I now realise that sounds a bit like a contradiction. I said I could copy on autopilot but also I had to focus on it. I suppose it was more like the second one: I was so focused on copying verbatim (as furiously as I could as there was barely time to do it before it was rubbed out!) that I didn't have a chance to think about the content.
> > Or summarising notes in your words.
> Which is what you do, if you take down notes.
I certainly disagree with this. No one I knew was rephrasing the lecturer's notes in their own terms. There was no time for that. That is something you'd have to do in your own time afterwards, at a much slower pace.
> > but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity
> The necessity was created by the teachers in order to get the students to learn.
I assure you, the main reason those maths lecturers didn't spend countless hours typing up their handwritten notes in LaTeX was not the best interests of the students!
Having to spend 95% of the time taking notes of things that could be distributed in a PDF has only ever hindered me academically. It's mechanical and boring, my mind tunes out and I get nothing out of it.
For instance, I have almost completely forgotten how to solve ODEs, even though I had a good command of it when I learned it (by solving practice problems). In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.
Everyone likes nicely typeset LaTeX -- why not apply that craftsmanship to preserving academic notes?
I don't really get it. If you've truly forgotten, you have to relearn it one way or another. What makes you think your past student self improvising a half-assed explanation in the moment could do better than a professional author who was already an expert when they wrote the book?
To this day I still take countless notes when I learn new things, I just find it incredibly distracting to have to take notes during a lecture/class because it doesn't allow me to process the material properly.