Almost all my life, September has signaled the start of a new year – new pens, new paper, clean notebooks,…
Since I was four years old, September, rather than January has been the New Year.
This year, I will be spending it at home writing a book rather than teaching or being a student, but that doesn’t change how it feels. Also, everyone else in my house will be going back to school in a few weeks. Almost everyone is looking forward to it. Oddly (or perhaps not), the one who is looking forward to it the least is the one person in the house who is getting paid to go back to school.
Anyhow, I came across this (posted by Alice Daer… thanks!)
DIY Ultimate Note-Taking Notebook.
I’m one of those people for whom a trip to a stationary store can be an almost religious experience, so obviously, the thought of making my own notebooks sounds just peachy. I really like this idea, though I don’t know if I would actually take the time to do it. The page organization is a great idea though:
This got me to thinking about something else: how important is reorganizing one’s notes as a form of studying? Many students take notes on a computer these days, and while there’s nothing really wrong with that, it brings up a couple of questions:
1. Do we take in information differently when we type as opposed to when we write with a pen or pencil? I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was the case, but I can’t remember where I saw the study (suggestions anyone?). If I remember correctly, the study concluded that we remember better when we write things than we do when we type. (This prompts another question,… see later).
2. Do students who type their notes rather than write them actually do anything more than read their notes by way of studying?
When I was an undergrad, there were some semesters where I would take rough notes in class, and then re-copy (and re-organize) them in a good notebook after I got home. Sometimes I even re-did them in colours with additional illustrations and references to relevant pages in the text. Those were the courses where I didn’t have to study before the exam at all. They were also the courses in which I did really well. This process turns out to be an excellent way to study (I never learned how to study in high school because I never needed to). Re-writing notes forces you to review and to make sense of what you heard that day. This got me to wondering…. do people who type their notes ever do anything more than copy & paste them elsewhere? Do they even do that, or do they just read them?
The other question I had has to do with the notion that we assimilate information differently when we write than when we type. I wonder if that is generational? What I mean is that I remember things better when I write than when I type, but I have spent the bulk of my life taking notes by writing. I’m not a good typist. In fact I can’t touch-type at all so I still need to use a part of my brain to spell many words as I type them. Seems to me this would naturally interfere with my ability to take in what I am typing about. What about people who have grown up typing? Do they have the same problem? Perhaps they have the opposite problem – perhaps they have more trouble when they have to write something. And if that’s true, what would be equivalent to re-writing notes for them? It can’t just be copying and pasting, can it?
I can’t believe that there is anything ‘natural’ about writing to learn – we haven’t always been literate creatures. There’s fodder for a potentially interesting and useful study here, if not several. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the money to do them. Anyone?
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
This post assumes that note-taking is a valuable part of learning. I never found it so. I do better to listen attentively and read attentively, without trying to copy stuff down.
This is precisely why I don’t use laptops (distraction aside).
Laptops do not give you the freedom to organise your notes on a whim. Where notes are useful to me, they are via kinaesthetic and, especially, visual cues.
Physically grouping ideas together to highlight relevance or express inter-relations makes more sense to me. If I asked you to make up a story to write me, I would ask you make it like a graph, rather than a novel.
Take math, for instance. The positions of the numbers are critical to my ability to use them. At work, someone stopped me to point out that I can do math laterally, in my head (that is, given a list of numbers, I can add or multiply them from left to right) – about as fast as they can punch them in a calculator.
I replied that I could only do that by working with each decimal place in order (say, tens, then ones). If you asked me to do ones and then tens, I’d probably mess it up pretty badly. Yet, that’s the approach you’ve probably used since early grade school – digits aligned vertically about a decimal column.
Maybe there are math note-takers written around that convention, too – but none that really cover the spectrum without being an overpriced pad of paper.