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I had a teacher that routinely did this. I hated it. The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher wa

I had a teacher that routinely did this. I hated it. The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. Then, on "step 15" we get the "Oh, did anyone notice this on Step 3?" and then they'd erase the board and we'd start again. I never felt it was an interesting technique, especially early on, when, again, at least for me, I'm just trying to absorb everything. I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples. Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me.

katbyte 2y ago
I think it works well for the early grades with simple problems like 5x5=24 to get young kids interested or your vs you’re But anything beyond that anything multi step is just not useful - you talk about taking notes young kids are not taking notes
botanical76 2y ago
This is only slightly related, but if you don't understand, what value do your notes actually have? Or is this an environment with no lecture recordings, digital presentations or notes shared with the class..? I ask out of a genuine curiosity, since I know many people benefit from live note taking. I can only imagine notes being useful if they constituted a synthesis of the teacher's guidance.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I had the same curiosity. Every time I've tried meticulous note taking it turned in to this thing where now I've given myself permission to do something mechanical now and put off the hard thinking until later. And then when I tried to do it later, the moment for asking for clarification had passed.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Office hours are useful to ask for clarification, but the mere act of writing it down by hand helps commit it to memory.
programjames 2y ago
Ideally, you should only work at learning something if you don't know it. Repetition wastes a lot of time to get that guarantee, but it would be much more efficient to just recognize where you're weak and work at that. It's a rather lazy meta-learning strategy to just throw spaghetti at the wall until everything sticks. I think it's fine if someone chooses to learn this way, but it's unfair to expect all the other students to waste their time---I really hated when math teachers assigned 30 problems of homework, because I didn't need 30 of the same problem to know how to solve it, and almost no one does. Really, you only need repetition for a small percent of the content, it's just what "clicks" for each person is different. I appreciated what my high school chemistry teacher did instead: all problem sets were optional, but there were recommended problems. Then, we had tests every two weeks which we were allowed to retake, but only once we solved the problems. That way, we quickly see if we're missing any knowledge and are forced to learn it for a good grade.
pxc 2y ago
> I had a teacher that routinely did this. > I hated it. > The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. I've observed this relation for myself, but the causality in my experience has clearly been reversed: it's not really possible for me to pay much attention to what is being taught when I'm working so hard just to write it down. Taking sparse, partial notes— or no notes at all— always left me way more room to think about the material. This kind of approach works a lot better when you have a competent textbook that you can actually take home, which is only occasionally the case for high schoolers and almost never the case for elementary schoolers. When you have a decent textbook you can always make 'slow notes' from that at your leisure, if you really need them, and you can also do the readings before class so that all you need from the lecture is to fill in gaps. But either way, trying to copy down the whole board is almost always the wrong way to take notes unless you are typing and can do so much more quickly than the board changes, IME. It's just way too much overhead and doesn't leave enough room for substantive engagement.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Photograph the board?
  - pxc 2y ago
    Definitely a better move nowadays! Wasn't an option for me before college, though.
- wombatpm 2y ago
  Try taking organic chemistry. The professor would show up early and fill three blackboards with synthesis reactions. It was then a race to keep up for the next 50 minutes.
  - pxc 2y ago
    In your opinion, was that an effective approach to teaching, either in general or with respect to the specific material? Sounds very strange to me.
lanthade 2y ago
For this to be a valid pedagogical technique it has to be applied properly for the intended student. As described in the linked article for middle elementary aged students it seems effective. I can easily imagine my own middle elementary aged child responding well to it. Your experience however seems to be either in secondary or collegiate classrooms and I can easily see where this approach there would often be problematic. That said if an instructor is trying to get students to engage in critical thinking about why something works then an intentional mistake could be educational. You can copy code from stack overflow all day long but it’s going to work a lot better if you can actually analyze it and understand what’s happening.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
Agreed - I had a teacher that would do this in high school physics from time to time and I found it be a distraction more than anything - I'm trying to follow what's on the board and then I have to throw that away and start trying to figure it out from the top.
lern_too_spel 2y ago
If you're just writing down what the teacher wrote to memorize later, you're not learning the math properly. You should be deriving the solution at least one step ahead of the teacher. Occasionally, there will be a clever insight where you might have to wait for the teacher to tell you that step, but those should be the minority. Once you get the insight, you should be jumping ahead again. It's the same in work meetings. If you're blindly absorbing what the presenter is saying, you're not a helpful participant. You should be deriving your own solutions and questioning differences between your solution and the presenter's when they arise. Sometimes, companies pay for improv classes for their employees to help them anticipate and react in meetings, but if you're already practiced in classroom learning, that's redundant.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> I'm just trying to absorb everything My realization on this: teachers were a really bad fit for me. Having a human trying to make it palatable to me in real time in their own words was just not great. At some point I stopped listening in class nor taking notes and just read the manual and other related books on my own, at my own pace (often during class), and it worked a hundred times better. There's still the issue of having to be in the classroom, which meant doing that whole learning process ahead of time to be able to defocus and still somewhat react to questions and activities going on in the classroom.
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
I think it works significantly better in a class of third graders. Among other differences, they usually aren't taking notes yet.
ghusto 2y ago
> I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples. > > Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me. I think that's kind of the point. Everyone can learn using the method you describe (it's mainly how I go about it), but everyone can also learn the "proper" way. It just requires more commitment and belief in yourself upfront.

katbyte 2y ago

I think it works well for the early grades with simple problems like 5x5=24 to get young kids interested or your vs you’re But anything beyond that anything multi step is just not useful - you talk about taking notes young kids are not taking notes

botanical76 2y ago

This is only slightly related, but if you don't understand, what value do your notes actually have? Or is this an environment with no lecture recordings, digital presentations or notes shared with the class..? I ask out of a genuine curiosity, since I know many people benefit from live note taking. I can only imagine notes being useful if they constituted a synthesis of the teacher's guidance.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I had the same curiosity. Every time I've tried meticulous note taking it turned in to this thing where now I've given myself permission to do something mechanical now and put off the hard thinking until later. And then when I tried to do it later, the moment for asking for clarification had passed.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Office hours are useful to ask for clarification, but the mere act of writing it down by hand helps commit it to memory.

programjames 2y ago

Ideally, you should only work at learning something if you don't know it. Repetition wastes a lot of time to get that guarantee, but it would be much more efficient to just recognize where you're weak and work at that. It's a rather lazy meta-learning strategy to just throw spaghetti at the wall until everything sticks. I think it's fine if someone chooses to learn this way, but it's unfair to expect all the other students to waste their time---I really hated when math teachers assigned 30 problems of homework, because I didn't need 30 of the same problem to know how to solve it, and almost no one does. Really, you only need repetition for a small percent of the content, it's just what "clicks" for each person is different. I appreciated what my high school chemistry teacher did instead: all problem sets were optional, but there were recommended problems. Then, we had tests every two weeks which we were allowed to retake, but only once we solved the problems. That way, we quickly see if we're missing any knowledge and are forced to learn it for a good grade.

pxc 2y ago

> I had a teacher that routinely did this. > I hated it. > The issue is that, at least for me, I'm madly trying to capture in my notes whatever it is the teacher was presenting. I've observed this relation for myself, but the causality in my experience has clearly been reversed: it's not really possible for me to pay much attention to what is being taught when I'm working so hard just to write it down. Taking sparse, partial notes— or no notes at all— always left me way more room to think about the material. This kind of approach works a lot better when you have a competent textbook that you can actually take home, which is only occasionally the case for high schoolers and almost never the case for elementary schoolers. When you have a decent textbook you can always make 'slow notes' from that at your leisure, if you really need them, and you can also do the readings before class so that all you need from the lecture is to fill in gaps. But either way, trying to copy down the whole board is almost always the wrong way to take notes unless you are typing and can do so much more quickly than the board changes, IME. It's just way too much overhead and doesn't leave enough room for substantive engagement.

justinclift 2y ago
Photograph the board?
- pxc 2y ago
  Definitely a better move nowadays! Wasn't an option for me before college, though.
wombatpm 2y ago
Try taking organic chemistry. The professor would show up early and fill three blackboards with synthesis reactions. It was then a race to keep up for the next 50 minutes.
- pxc 2y ago
  In your opinion, was that an effective approach to teaching, either in general or with respect to the specific material? Sounds very strange to me.

lanthade 2y ago

For this to be a valid pedagogical technique it has to be applied properly for the intended student. As described in the linked article for middle elementary aged students it seems effective. I can easily imagine my own middle elementary aged child responding well to it. Your experience however seems to be either in secondary or collegiate classrooms and I can easily see where this approach there would often be problematic. That said if an instructor is trying to get students to engage in critical thinking about why something works then an intentional mistake could be educational. You can copy code from stack overflow all day long but it’s going to work a lot better if you can actually analyze it and understand what’s happening.

jamesfinlayson 2y ago

Agreed - I had a teacher that would do this in high school physics from time to time and I found it be a distraction more than anything - I'm trying to follow what's on the board and then I have to throw that away and start trying to figure it out from the top.

lern_too_spel 2y ago

If you're just writing down what the teacher wrote to memorize later, you're not learning the math properly. You should be deriving the solution at least one step ahead of the teacher. Occasionally, there will be a clever insight where you might have to wait for the teacher to tell you that step, but those should be the minority. Once you get the insight, you should be jumping ahead again. It's the same in work meetings. If you're blindly absorbing what the presenter is saying, you're not a helpful participant. You should be deriving your own solutions and questioning differences between your solution and the presenter's when they arise. Sometimes, companies pay for improv classes for their employees to help them anticipate and react in meetings, but if you're already practiced in classroom learning, that's redundant.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> I'm just trying to absorb everything My realization on this: teachers were a really bad fit for me. Having a human trying to make it palatable to me in real time in their own words was just not great. At some point I stopped listening in class nor taking notes and just read the manual and other related books on my own, at my own pace (often during class), and it worked a hundred times better. There's still the issue of having to be in the classroom, which meant doing that whole learning process ahead of time to be able to defocus and still somewhat react to questions and activities going on in the classroom.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

I think it works significantly better in a class of third graders. Among other differences, they usually aren't taking notes yet.

ghusto 2y ago

> I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and still barely understand what I'm doing. Many times one can succeed by blindly following a process without understanding, and over time that understanding arrives, aided by repetition and application of the examples. > > Folks learn differently with different ways. This was not an effective teaching technique for me. I think that's kind of the point. Everyone can learn using the method you describe (it's mainly how I go about it), but everyone can also learn the "proper" way. It just requires more commitment and belief in yourself upfront.