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There's value in thinking about the topic you're trying to learn, while you're learning it. When I was in college, I handwrote my notes, then I switched to typi
by hot_gril 3y ago
There's value in thinking about the topic you're trying to learn, while you're learning it. When I was in college, I handwrote my notes, then I switched to typing, then I switched to no notes. Just paid close attention in lecture and thought about the topic during any pauses in talking. Worked wonders.
Part of this relied on the professors distributing lecture slides afterwards, which they always did. Helped jog my memory later and remind me of what to study for the final.
- zamadatix 3y agoThere is definitely a quality balance to be had between taking notes and understanding, particularly true if you know you aren't going to go back and put in the proper time to study the notes you made afterward. For an extreme example I had a calculus class where your notes were graded but if you wanted an A you pretty much had to write the entire book section set by hand. It resulted in one of the worst retention rates I had of any class because it was a mad dash to write everything down to get the A and then you had to go back and spend time trying to think about what you just wrote. On the other hand in another calculus class notes weren't graded and I ended up with basically 1 sheet (front/back) with a few notes on things I didn't get 100% or wanted to remind myself of later and then spent 10 minutes outside of class reviewing those to great success.
- peterleiser 3y agoMy wife and I have never heard of being graded on your notes. Which school was this?
- chongli 3y agoI tried handwriting notes several times in my math classes. It did not work well. I am not a fast or neat writer, so it was always a desperate struggle to keep up. Many professors preferred not to distribute any notes or slides, and loved to lecture on the board at lightning speed (writing and erasing at least a dozen boards worth of material in 50 minutes). When I switched to typing my notes in LaTeX (using vim) it made all the difference. I could actually keep up with the professor and think about what they were saying without getting hopelessly behind on the proof. The strategy of only writing down the important details that everyone advocates does not work very well in math. I can't know what the important details are until days or even weeks after the lecture, when I've had enough time to digest and work through the material while completing the assigned problems. Of course, this is much more true at the beginning of a course (when I've had no prior exposure to the topic) than it is at the end.
- hot_gril 3y agoI took math LaTeX notes in Vim too. Once I got past the learning curve, it was much faster than writing just because of the ability to copy-paste a proof line. It was even an ok form of scratch space for solving problems, though pencil+paper was usually best. But I didn't take enough math classes to really see if it'd help, and in comp sci classes it didn't.
- Sai_ 3y agoWould be interesting if someone made a hardware device to be placed in classrooms which took periodic photos of the board and transcribed it into searchable text using an LLM.
- chongli 3y agoI have taken photos of the board and I've seen lots of classmates do it as well. I had one prof who absolutely forbid any photos in class, even if they were just of the notes on the board. I saw one student defy him and take photos anyway. After class he sprinted over to that student and demanded to see his ID, which he photographed and then left. The poor student followed him all the way out of the room and down the hall, begging not to be reported to the associate dean's office!