Re: taking notes

[Rick Tarara <rtarara@SAINTMARYS.EDU>]

I think it is important for all of us who teach to reflect on our own
note-taking experience and 'learn' from it.  I detested (especially in
grad-school) instructors who transcribed the book (or worse--every third
line of the book) on the chalkboards and never added anything to it.  On the
other hand, I had a QM professor who transcribed his notes (from memory)
that comprised a fairly complete 4th-year level course--no book.  It might
have been nice to have his notes Xeroxed, but he went slow enough that we
could keep up AND consider what was being said and done.

What I see as the compromise approach to classes--neither pure lecture or
purely interactive 'studio' courses--involves a lot of discussion of topics
with the class participating, lots of small demonstrations laced with
computer simulations/graphics, some use of PowerPoint-style outlines of
special topics (either done differently than the book or pulled from outside
the text).  The one problem with this approach is that students are so
'programmed' that taking notes is copying what you write on the board that
they get very little down in their notebooks to review later.  My
compensation for this is to cover the most important topics over and
over--albeit in slightly different contexts and always trying to expand the
understanding and applicability.  When I do have notes up from PowerPoint, I
have to stop people from trying to copy them down--they are available for
print out later--so that they can concentrate on the meaning of the words,
to pay attention to the demos, and to participate in the discussions.  Again
this is their programming to copy everything seen 'on the board'.  In my
Gen-Ed classes, I seldom write more than a few lines on the boards each
class--but the problem then is that the student notebooks often have only a
few lines in them from each class.  Of course in the science majors courses,
we do plenty of problem solving and that is something appropriate for the
notebooks, but I also mix in plenty of the Gen-Ed style discussions of the
basic concepts.  I do discuss note-taking some at the start of the course,
but if I didn't have 64 in a class (with no TAs) I would collect notebooks
at least once to learn for myself and to better guide the students in terms
of what they are and should be writing down.

Rick
(It's dead time here--classes over, exams written, but waiting to give and
then grade them--also not close enough to the exams to be getting the
frantic last-minute questions like -- 'I don't understand that whole thing
you've been doing with throwing the ball up--can you explain it to
me?"--which takes in just about the entire semester's worth of concepts!)

**********************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

FREE PHYSICS INSTRUCTIONAL SOFTWARE
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/
PC and MAC software
NEW! SIMLAB2001--DYNAMIC CARTS now available.
CD-ROMs now available
******************************************************


----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Jeglinski" <jeglin@4PI.COM>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 12:02 PM
Subject: 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