Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.
Taking down the lesson/lecture does relatively little, you can do it on autopilot. If anything, it distracts from listening to the content. When I took computer science at university (mid naughties) we were given digital lecture notes anyway. (Mathematics lectures did have to be written down but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity.) It's the exercises afterwards that are useful for learning. Or summarising notes in your words.
> Taking down the lesson/lecture does relatively little
Not my experience.
> you can do it on autopilot
Huh, that sounds magically to me, I certainly can't. Actually taking notes down does the opposite, it forces you to get out of the autopilot, because you must think about the content.
Taking notes down, helps you learn better, because you use way more brain areas to process the information. Instead of just hearing, you need to hear it, understand it, try to rephrase it in your own words, use you motoric skills to write it down, and then see it and the placement of element on your page.
> we were given digital lecture notes anyway
Which you don't learn anything from, because by downloading you processed exactly none of the content yourself. Yeah they are way better to eventually search the information later on, if you already no the topic, but for learning you need to start with understanding it and structure it in your brain, which you would have already done for the first time, if you have taken notes.
> but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity
The necessity was created by the teachers in order to get the students to learn. It didn't fell down from the sky.
> Or summarising notes in your words.
Which is what you do, if you take down notes. And that on a real time loop, so you can't slack down or miss something, because the information won't come again.
Fair enough. We all learn differently. For me, having printed lecture notes meant I could listen (imperfectly!) in lectures rather than focusing on copying. It was a revelation after years of exhausting lectures doing nothing but writing.
I now realise that sounds a bit like a contradiction. I said I could copy on autopilot but also I had to focus on it. I suppose it was more like the second one: I was so focused on copying verbatim (as furiously as I could as there was barely time to do it before it was rubbed out!) that I didn't have a chance to think about the content.
> > Or summarising notes in your words.
> Which is what you do, if you take down notes.
I certainly disagree with this. No one I knew was rephrasing the lecturer's notes in their own terms. There was no time for that. That is something you'd have to do in your own time afterwards, at a much slower pace.
> > but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity
> The necessity was created by the teachers in order to get the students to learn.
I assure you, the main reason those maths lecturers didn't spend countless hours typing up their handwritten notes in LaTeX was not the best interests of the students!
When I did a CS degree in the 1980s we had one lecturer who handed out copies of hand-written notes but then would talk about stuff that wasn't really in the notes - sort of verbal annotations.
Of course you learn more if you retype material than if you do nothing, but it's still a waste of time, comparatively speaking, because there are much better ways of engaging with the material like solving practice problems.
Having to spend 95% of the time taking notes of things that could be distributed in a PDF has only ever hindered me academically. It's mechanical and boring, my mind tunes out and I get nothing out of it.
Am I the only one who enjoys taking notes? But more in the sense of recording knowledge so that I have it in perpetuity.
For instance, I have almost completely forgotten how to solve ODEs, even though I had a good command of it when I learned it (by solving practice problems). In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.
Everyone likes nicely typeset LaTeX -- why not apply that craftsmanship to preserving academic notes?
It's not that I don't enjoy taking notes - I liked to take notes, distill knowledge, make "cheatsheets" outside of class.
To this day I still take countless notes when I learn new things, I just find it incredibly distracting to have to take notes during a lecture/class because it doesn't allow me to process the material properly.
>In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.
I don't really get it. If you've truly forgotten, you have to relearn it one way or another. What makes you think your past student self improvising a half-assed explanation in the moment could do better than a professional author who was already an expert when they wrote the book?
Because you never truly forget something. If you took effort to generate a rehash of your own mental brain model, first you will recognize it again and thus don't need to relearn everything, and second you already have it in your own brain model, instead of needing to invent it first from someone's else brain model.
Yes some people teach C this way, for a little while, I don’t forget semicolons as much as people around me later seemed too, may or may not be related
It confused me at the time, mainly because I had a class with written-out C and one with written-out Pascal in the same semester. The Pascal prof wouldn't mark off for C syntax but the C one would would mark off for Pascal syntax.
Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.