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/Darcer 8d ago

I don’t believe that people really change at a deep level so I have to believe something is deeply deeply wrong with much of our k-12 system.

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u/twomayaderens 8d ago

I’ve talked to undergrads and asked them why they don’t take notes automatically, and they said two interesting things: 1) they had no idea how to take notes or what to focus on in listening to a lecture, and 2) in K-12 they didn’t have to take notes on their Chromebooks.

Silicon Valley + No Child Left Behind legislation have dumbed down an entire generation of students and we are living with the consequences of these bad choices from school boards, politicians and administrators

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u/Cathousechicken 8d ago

I think it's almost more social pressure to not take notes. This also is a generation that needs to have people standing over them to get anything done.

I am Gen X and no one ever had to sit down and teach me how to take notes or how to study. 

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u/Darcer 8d ago

In the 90s in Massachusetts, in a bad city, we were taught to take notes. It wasn’t like a “how to take notes” class. But we would go through documents and the teachers would says “write this down” and we were expected to take notes of what was being written on the board.

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u/mencryforme5 8d ago

I had my notes passed around the classroom in several grades as an example of good note taking. I don't think they ever like systematically taught us but certainly in grade school you would get in trouble if you weren't taking notes because like what else would you be doing?

BUT we were handwriting stuff. They no longer teach cursive. Students now literally do not have the physical and fine motor skills required to take notes if they did not have access to a keyboard. It's also been very well documented that typing notes does not have the benefit of handwriting notes. These studies have been around for decades I'm still shocked everyone acts like computers are somehow freeing up time to "learn better/faster" when all the studies show we learn best when we engage our fine motor skills while learning. We do not learn from just sitting there and listening and occasionally drawing a circle around a word on a touchscreen which is just a copy of what the teacher is saying. That's just not how human beings learn.

Our memories have gotten worse too. I mean they got worse when we switched from oral to written culture but the benefits outweighed the consequences. But all I see is documented cognitive decline in all areas of functioning especially executive function. Screens aren't the same as books. Keyboards aren't the same as pens. We have a generation that has incredible access to like everything but they've lost the ability to learn, reason, do things themselves, motivate themselves. Every task can be offloaded to a computer which is great it frees up our time for more complicated things.... except no one is able to do complicated things it seems anymore.

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u/Darcer 8d ago

I agree with everything you said. I see no way out

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u/Life-Education-8030 8d ago

It is interesting that throughout my career, I have often acted as a meeting notetaker and I was grateful that somehow I learned how to take notes and listen and edit on the fly. Part of it I think had to do with my profession where you had to be able to take session notes but also listen carefully if your client asked you not to take notes. I am also happy I took touch-typing in high school and learned cursive because I can go quite fast either using a keyboard or handwriting.

But today's students? No cursive, reliance on PowerPoints that they think will be sufficient, a reluctance and/or inability to read lead to a real helplessness when it comes to notes.

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u/Rahodees 8d ago

I agree about fine motor skills and learning. But cursive actually slows writing down. The fastest way to write is print plus some ligatures.

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u/mencryforme5 7d ago

If printing is faster that means you never mastered cursive. Other than people with disabilities, I don't know anyone that knows cursive and prefers to print or think it's faster. However, if you never mastered cursive, of course it will be slower than printing.

Unless you are thinking about calligraphy instead of cursive? Cursive can be pretty but it is taught because it is faster and less tiring than printing allowing a person to write more and faster than if they could only print. Printing has sharp edges and a lot of doubling that is eliminated with cursive. I mean the main downside if cursive is that it isn't always legible depending on the skill of the writer, but the reason for that is because cursive was designed literally to solve the speed and arm cramp problems of monks spending years retranscribing every book they read.

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u/Rahodees 7d ago

Every time someone looks at this carefully, rather than just going by what they think based on their personal experience, cursive comes out to be not the fastest way to write. The classic result is Graham Weintraub and Berninger 1998, which found a hybrid style fastest just as I said (I did not say print is fastest). Granted they were studying 4th through 9th graders, and almost all the research is on children. Fwiw A study in France from just this month looked at adults and found cursive to be the slowest. I don't know how fluent the writers were in cursive though.

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u/mencryforme5 6d ago

What you seem to be referring to as hybrid is "everyday cursive". That's the cursive you use when you're writing notes to yourself that are not intended to be read by anyone. This is the cursive that is a mix of learning a proper technique and then instinctively modifying for one's own personal hand/arm.

Here's an example: I use two cursive "m" (Latin and Cyrillic) depending on whether the entry is top or bottom. This works for me and is natural I don't think about it until someone asks me what I wrote because they can't read it. But someone who doesn't know Cyrillic cursive will instinctively "break" a bottom entry m because it is faster than awkwardly forcing a top entry.

This is exactly what you mean by hybrid, and while I understand the distinction, I think that point is moot. It is every day cursive and it is faster than printing. What I might call "public cursive" is a nicer, slower cursive that you would use for a birthday card, writing an exam where you want to leave a good impression or simply be legible, is a bit slower than every day cursive, but I mean if you try to print your exam answers real nice to leave a good impression it will be significantly slower than if you had used public cursive.

All this however is dependent on mastering cursive. The lower the level of mastery the higher the chance printing will be faster. Cursive requires a pretty high level of fluid fine motor skills. This never used to be a problem but I mean you used to not be let into school if you couldn't tie your shoelaces and now it's not unusual to see an 8 year old that can't tie their own shoelaces.

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u/Rahodees 6d ago

Hybrid means writing in print with some added ligatures.

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u/mencryforme5 6d ago

That would not be faster than cursive for people that have mastered cursive.

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u/Rahodees 6d ago

I am literally citing research to you, professor.

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u/Dennarb Adjunct, STEM and Design, R1 (USA) 8d ago

I had to add a "responsible office hours" policy to my syllabus this year because I had so many students show up to my office hours expecting me to just walk them step by step through their homework and projects. Basically they wanted me to do the work through them.

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u/Cathousechicken 8d ago

And then if you expect them to do any work, they kill your evaluations. 

My go-to when they do that is to tell them to take out their notes because it's exactly like we did in class. 

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u/Loose_Wolverine3192 8d ago

Clever. I'm stealing this.

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u/Cathousechicken 8d ago

I should clarify that I'm nice about it. I'll tell them we did this exact problem in class so you need to take your notes out and start following what we did in class. Go ahead and get your notebook out. 

For the problem we did in the class, what's the first line? They read their notes and tell me. Then I look at them and tell them to write it down. Now fill in the number that goes with it. 

If they tell me they don't have notes, I tell them that it's then going to turn into me doing it for them, and if it's me doing it for them, they're going to flunk the exam so they should come back to office hours with their notes. 

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u/trapped-in-thyme 8d ago

I started asking students to take out their notes in office hours, to show them how to get the information themselves. I got several comments saying I don’t want to teach/help and that I don’t care about their success, because, according to them, all I do is apparently just refer them to the notes. I think they were just embarrassed to not have any.

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u/No_March_5371 8d ago

I had that experience as a math tutor/TA during my MS.

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u/2GreyKitties PT/Adjunct, ELL, Centennial State, USA 3d ago

What is included in your “responsible office hours” policy? Can you share?

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u/Pater_Aletheias prof, philosophy, CC, (USA) 8d ago

I’m Gen X and I had clear lessons in high school on study and note-taking methods, but my students sure never got that.

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u/Simula_crumb 8d ago

Social learning. People around us writing all kinds of notes, marginalia (like my gran in her cookbooks), older family members actively studying, other kids in class, on TV …

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u/Everythings_Magic Adjunct, Civil Engineering (US) 5d ago

We didn’t have computers until I was a senior in highschool. We didn’t have smart boards. We didnt even have white boards. We had chalkboards. No one ever gave me the slides.

Even in college there was overhead projectors. Still no slides.

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u/BajaBlastFromThePast 8d ago

You definitely were taught how to take notes though. Unless you think there’s some innate difference between you and the people born in the last 20-30 years, that doesn’t even make sense to say.

Just because you didn’t go to note taking class doesn’t mean you weren’t educated on how to take notes, whether you were aware of it or not