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Re: Costs of textbooks



At 13:11 -0800 12/13/01, kowalskil wrote:

"Our course has no particular textbook. I will be using
many textbooks and you are expected to take good notes.
Use any textbook you can find to help you but count on
the notes taken. ..."

That was essentially the situation when I was a student.
We knew that missing classes was highly undesirable and
we learned by taking notes. Taking notes is not a purely
mechanical process of recording; one must constantly
think and decide what is worth writing down. In most
cases taking notes is a process of active participation.
The Internet can then be used to post homework problems
and to discuss the material. What is wrong with this?

In principle, this is a good idea, but it has some major drawbacks,
especially in introductory courses. Note-taking is not a skill that
one gets just by taking lots of notes. So having a class rely almost
entirely on the students' ability to take notes means that those who
happen, for whatever reason, to be good at it will have a distinct
advantage over the other students. Good note-taking involves being
able to write legibly enough that the notes can be read later, and
having a lexicon of good abbreviations for long terms and/or phrases
that can be written quickly but are transparent enough that they can
be deciphered later. These skills can be taught, but seldom are, and
if the students are to rely on their own self-developed note-taking
skills, I suspect that many will fall by the wayside. There is also
the problem that some ideas will be mistranslated into notes so that
they will be learned incorrectly, with no clear source that they can
use to correct the ideas later.

Another issue with note-taking, is knowing just what to write down.
You can't simply transcribe the class, unless you are proficient at
shorthand, and even that is problematical, as any court reporter or
stenographer will tell you. In introductory classes, the students
simply don't know what is important and needs to be recorded and what
is window dressing so can be left out of the notes. They also don't
know, at least at first, what material will actually be tested. If
you can only write down a fraction of what goes on in the class, at
the very least, you need to get down the stuff that you will be held
responsible for on the tests. Getting the "cultural" stuff is
valuable, too, but if you just get that and then miss the material to
be on the test because you are too busy writing, you will be at a
considerable disadvantage.

I have found it true in my case, although I don't know how general
this tendency is, that when I have to take notes, I cannot pay much
attention to what is being said, and thus I often miss some of the
important nuances, and am too busy keeping up with my writing to
actively participate in any discussion. Nor can I think about what is
being said, my brain seems occupied with being a conduit from my ears
to my writing hand. Often, if the discussion gets really interesting,
I forget that I need to take notes and get caught up in the
discussion. Then when the class is over, I may have had a stimulating
experience, but I have trouble remembering what went on.

Finally, and this is related to the last paragraph, when a speaker is
charismatic and captivating, the audience gets caught up in the
class, following what is happening and forgetting to take notes. I am
told by a couple of people who took classes from Fermi that this
happened often in his classes--he was such a captivating and luminous
speaker that the class would be caught up in what was going on and
thinking that it was all so clear and obvious that they would never
forget this stuff, and after leaving the class, nobody could remember
what had happened. This, I understand, is why there are several
volumes of Fermi's lecture notes in print that are simply offsets of
his hand-written notes. They were presumably put together by his grad
students so that the students in the classes would have something to
work from.

Of course, I'm sure there aren't too many Fermis amongst us, but it
does remain one drawback of not having some authoritative text for
the students to use, even if it is just to sort out stuff they didn't
understand in class. If nothing else, a text can act as a sort of
"security blanket"--a la Linus van Pelt--that they can rely on to
fill in the blanks when the teacher doesn't.

I would say this last probably is more important in high school than
college, but it is probably true there as well, at least to some
extent.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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