COLUMN: A Couple of Notes on Notetaking
I’m sure that for most of you, as for me, this summer went by very slowly and painfully as you waited ever so anxiously for school to start again. If you were in the summer semester, then you have every right to want to slap the rest of us in the face for this seemingly ignorant stance. Slap in the face or not, however, us poor folk could only sit and wait out our summer vacation until fall semester began. I’ve never been the waiting type (which has made all my doctor and dentist appointments practically hostage situations), so I went to extreme measures just to make the school year come quicker. As a result, I did a worldwide search of universities everywhere and found out that the University of Costa Rica started its semester at the beginning of August. I wasted no time in buying a ticket and coming down. I guess, technically you would call it “Study Abroad,” but I like to call it “Party Abroad.” Of course, “Party Abroad” lasted only until school started, and then it died rather quickly.
So, by the time that I have written this column from the tropical confines of my Costa Rican home, I have been forced to suffer through unprecedented levels of pain in surviving my first weeks of class, and I now greatly lament that you, my fellow students, will have to go through the same torture. By now, you have already gone through the unenviable first week process of listening to your professors read their syllabus out loud (for all of those illiterate college students in their classes) and then do their very best to scare you out of their course, thus allowing them to spend their free time reading and rereading their own scholarly articles and adjusting their various diplomas on their office walls.
Yet, for those students who stay in class, the professor will then bombard you with his or her detailed lecture, and you will have no choice but ask yourself some very important questions, such as: How much of this lecture will be on the mid-term? What part of all this info am I expected to use in my research paper? And, of course, how much of this is just the professor going off on a tangent and is only a glorification of his or her own college days? Most of these questions don’t have readily available answers, though the answer to the last question is 88 percent. But even knowing that much, how can you even be sure which subjects are tangents and which aren’t?
Everyone goes through the dilemma of having a blank notebook in front of them and having to decide what, among all that the professor teaches, is worthy of putting down on paper. You might think that to play it safe, you can write everything down the professor says, in the order it was said. Unfortunately, I’ve tried that already this semester, and as soon as I looked back in my notebook a couple days later, I have to admit that my notes looked like a foreign language to me. Of course, a second later I realized that was because my classes are in Spanish … but even still, I would have to have a degree in cryptography just to be able to get a general idea of what the lecture consisted of in that one class period.
Well, I don’t want you to go through this first couple of weeks with the same problems that I’ve already encountered, so I will unselfishly give some pointers on how you can take good notes.
You’re probably thinking that there is one magical thing about notetaking that I’ll reveal to you that will automatically solve all of your notetaking needs.
Well, if you were thinking that, then let me tell you that life is not always full of quick and easy solutions … except in this case. The magical key to notetaking can be summarized in one word: doodling. By doodling, I am referring to the notion, not of whistling the tune to “Yankee Doodle” (though that is an untested theory for anyone thinking of trying it out), but of making spontaneous drawings in your notebook.
You know the saying, “Behind every great man is a great woman?” Well, behind every great artist is a long-winded professor. Many people don’t know this, mainly because it is taken from absolutely no source whatsoever and is very possibly made up by me, but Michelangelo was an Economic Theory in Medieval Society major before he turned his hand to the arts – skills he undoubtedly honed through in-class doodling.
Your doodles can be random patterns, layouts of dream houses, landscapes or even cartoon pigs. Even though these are the most common options (especially cartoon pigs), you shouldn’t limit yourself to these doodles alone. Experiment with your doodles. Be creative. You think the guy who invented the wheel did so by doodling the same stones as his friends in his Caveman Social Patterns and Tribal Movements 1020 class?
I’m not exempt from this, and I’d like to proudly declare that I just finished designing a board game in my class, a board game that I expect to be exploited in the mass market within a short while. I won’t give all the details on the game, since I’ve yet to secure the copyright, but let’s just say that it has something to do with pirates, treasure, an island, and of course, cartoon pigs.
Some of the more skeptical readers may look back on this and wonder how my suggestions will help improve anybody’s notetaking skills at all, let alone their learning progression in class. My response to such an argument is that did you know that 88 percent of professors’ lectures go off on tangents?
Marty Reeder is a senior majoring in history education. Any comments or extremely well-done doodles can be sent to martr@cc.usu.edu.