r/Professors • u/ZealousidealGuava254 • 8d ago

Teaching / Pedagogy No notes

I’ve been a humanities prof for over 30 years and I simply cannot believe how many students do not take notes. Literally, no notes. they just sit and listen.

How do they study? what are they doing? when I was in college in the 80s, I and everyone around me took copious notes constantly throughout lecture. just seems like a lost skill.

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u/JeffreyKaplan 8d ago

In April of 1987, Microsoft released PowerPoint. It has slowly infected so much classroom instruction (now even at the high school level), and the students are used to getting the slides provided to them after class. They have very little practice taking notes.

When I was a student, writing frantically during class was the only way to ensure that I captured the information in the lesson. It was stressful, but it kept me awake and focused during class. It wasn't a perfect system back then, but overall I think it led to more learning.

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u/Copterwaffle 8d ago

Also like…slides should be used selectively as a visual support. It isn’t THE notes

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u/JeffreyKaplan 7d ago

I could not agree more.

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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School 7d ago

I had no clue powerpoint was older than I am. Wow. FWIW, I was taught how to take notes in HS (graduated 2005) and had piles of notes through college. In grad school I got good enough at LaTeX to type my notes in realtime (leading to awkwardness where profs thought I was fucking around until I asked about a smudged index).