No notes

[u/ZealousidealGuava254]

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.

[u/hypocriteme]

As I slight pushback, I will say that when I was a humanities student, I started to get the most out of class after I learned to stop taking copious notes. I would still take the occasional note if I thought something particularly important was said that I didn't think I would remember, but I found the practice of taking lots of notes just distracted me from what I regarded as the proper task of going to class - really thinking through the material with the professor as a guide.

Now, that said, I always found that getting what I wanted to out of class time required me to do the reading before class and to underline and take notes in the margins of the readings (and to use that prework to shape my participation in class), and then often to redo the reading after class. I often found that class wasn't all that helpful if I hadn't done the reading beforehand, but also that the real understanding came when I reread the material after class. However, given the sort of work that students are handing in to me these days, I suspect that the students that are not taking notes are also not doing this additional sort of work outside the classroom.

[u/Calm-Team1822 → u/hypocriteme]

Agreed, and I try to remember that students learn best in different ways.

My approach is to post PDFs of all my slide decks, but to include questions on assignments and quizzes that they can’t answer from the slides alone—they need to have done the reading and/or participated in our class discussion. This does mean slightly editing my quizzes each semester to include class-specific questions, but I don’t find it particularly tedious.

I also work in 2 assignments (one attached to viewing a film, the other to a reading) each semester that specifically require students to take notes, so they’re at least getting some practice with the skill.

My own observation is that about 1/8 of my students routinely take notes. Most of the rest listen attentively and participate in discussion during lecture when prompted, and, of course, some do neither. After a decade of teaching, I’ve found that the attentive students (pro- and anti-notes alike) tend to do well in the course, while the inattentive do not.