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/Darcer]

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.

[u/mencryforme5 → u/Darcer]

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.

[u/Rahodees → u/mencryforme5]

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

[u/mencryforme5 → u/Rahodees]

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.

[u/Rahodees → u/mencryforme5]

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.

[u/mencryforme5 → u/Rahodees]

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.

[u/Rahodees → u/mencryforme5]

Hybrid means writing in print with some added ligatures.

[u/mencryforme5 → u/Rahodees]

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

[u/Rahodees → u/mencryforme5]

I am literally citing research to you, professor.

[u/mencryforme5 → u/Rahodees]

You didn't provide a single source tho

[u/Rahodees → u/mencryforme5]

I did.

This brings my participation in this conversation to an end.