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Re: taking notes



Let's move now from the advantage of the note-taking _act_
to the advantage of later having good notes to look at.
That's a different subject entirely.

My small contribution to this topic regards my grad school experience.

I often found myself saying to myself: why am I doing this? (taking
notes). Generally it was because I feared "missing something." I
would have much rather sat back and tried to absorb and think about
it in real time as John mentioned. If I knew that the topic on the
board at that moment was actually already done in the text, I could
have done so comfortably.

One problem was that I had a wide variety of professors. Some (I
discovered) just redid what the text already did, while others put
unique things on the board. But virtually none ever explained what
they were doing. I quickly outlived my welcome in one class by trying
to get the prof to note this point with every class, and so learned
to not question it.

Only one professor ever that I had saw this for what it was and in
just a couple of comments became a classroom -leader- by describing
beforehand the point and content of his lecture and whether it was
textbook-based or something unique. He was in fact a Brazilian
post-doc talked into teaching E&M by the regularly scheduled prof who
wanted to do something else for 2 quarters. Best teacher I ever had.


Stefan Jeglinski