18 The Lost Art of Note-Taking

Yesterday, one of my students accused me of not providing enough notes for her. In this case, handouts of what I had lectured on. Last semester, I was accused of giving too much notes because I had given out PowerPoint handouts by the dozen. You can’t win. Actually, she thought it was my responsibility to keep on hand all the handouts whether or not she got them when she was absent instead of asking her fellow students for the notes.

She thought the notes and the textbook should match one another. She argued that I concentrated too much on subjects while not going into dept h on others. Of course, as human beings we have our interests and try to share them with the students. I remember having a psychology professor who lectured extensively one chapter of the textbook while warning us the text would cover other chapters equally; and he was true to his word.

Many years ago, I took ten undergraduate classes in history and twenty-four in graduate schools in which the only thing the professor wrote on the black board was his name. The students were expected to keep up with the lecture and write down the notes. There was no slide presentation or movie shown as happened in my pre-college education days. No outline was written on the blackboard. No student ever asked any of the professors to repeat anything. The professors ranged from reading their notes in the driest and boriest monotone possible to others that brought the subject alive through the power of their words and ideas alone. No students carried on conversations, arrived late, left early, or repeatedly left the room. Some professors were still young at heart with the latest research while others while already old even though young physically because they had never updated their lecture notes in years. A few had accents that were very hard to understand. But we all soldiered on. We never complained. I remember one student who tried to take down one professor’s lecture in shorthand but gave it up and learned how to summarize. I have given permission for my students to audiotape me. If you were absent, you borrowed a fellow student’s notes to make copes on the new fangled Xerox copiers. In some colleges that big lecture halls, somebody made a business of hiring professional note-takers who would sell the product to the students.

When I first started teaching, every student tried to write down something. Today in every college I teach, note-taking is a lost art that perplexes students. You have to tell them to open up their notebooks to take notes. They make no effort to summarize the information but try to take down every possible word. They have no idea how to arrange the information. If they are absent, they ask if they missed anything important. Some of the students don’t even arrange their notes by subject in a loose-leaf notebook!

I’ve tried to solve this problem in various ways. At on e point, I thought PowerPoint was the solution. In one approach, I gave them entire contents. For some students, particularly those for whom English was a second language, benefited enormously because they could illustrations that helped them understand key concepts. They could hear the words pronounced correctly and see how these words were spelled. Unfortunately, other students failed to underline key concepts as I lectured and expounded. Still others simply saw this as no need to come to class or they could come to class late and easily catch up.

Then I tried to simplify the PowerPoint presentation and not give out copies of it. The students insisted upon copying down every word they saw. Because of their inability to summarize, I had to stop showing certain PowerPoints because they would want to copy down the entire thing instead of enjoying the presentation or summarizing it.

One colleague who observed me suggested that I give the students copies of the lectures and has them fill in the blank! She also suggested it was the responsibility of the professor to ask the students questions every five minutes to involve them in the process of learning. And here I was brought up to listen to lectures for one or two hours and it was my responsibility to ask the question if I did not understand the lecture or I was curious about something. I had a friend when he went to college that when the first day of recitation after the lecture they showed up expecting some additional information. The professor asked if they were any questions. There were none. Class dismissed. The next time the students had plenty of questions to ask.