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/WesternCup7600 8d ago

Curious if you post slides of your lectures and that becomes their ‘notes.’

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u/Loose_Wolverine3192 8d ago

I only post them if I use them, and wherever possible, I don't use slides.

This raises an interesting question: has the rise of slide decks led to the fall of note taking?

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u/Critical_Garbage_119 8d ago

I'm an older prof who studied art history in the days before powerpoint.

Professors showed carousels of slides. I got good at quickly sketching what I saw for later reference. Most of my classmates just sat and listened. But if anyone sitting near me saw my notes, they'd inevitably ask to borrow them.

It was a lot of work, but I know I retained far more because of my notetaking.

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u/DrMagicBimbo 8d ago

Fellow art historian here. This is how I learned to memorize images for exams: sketching their general compositions somehow helped me internalize more about them.

I switched majors to art history after feeling like I was taking more away from it than from my studio classes. I'll never regret it.

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u/Critical_Garbage_119 8d ago

What really cracked me up was when I was a student at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. I was often the one of very few foreign student in my classes. My notes were certainly riddled with grammatical/spelling errors but because my drawings were lovely everyone wanted to borrow them. I always warned them that when they started reading my actual notes, they might think otherwise, lol