How long ago was this course?!?

Any time in the last 15 years I'd have pulled the camera from my pocket and been taking snaps of the display.

-------> Cos they're always taking photos!

> Cos they're always taking photos!

You mean monitoring communications?

school in the past 15 years? How old are you?

Large CRT monitor might be a clue about how old the story is. But taking lecture notes are not necessarily a bad thing -- it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing.

it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing.

yeah thats one tiny upside compared to the massive downside of :

"You fail to take in the information and process it because 80% of your time is spent frantically copying notes down"

> The instructor understood what had happened, and the atmosphere in the room was rather frosty for the remainder of the day.

Did they try to screen out who did it?

Probably not - Ernie's already said that they weren't too bright...

A bit dim you might say...

We were told that copying the notes down longhand helps with memorising the content - 40 years or so ago handouts of any form were rare and usually confined to specific topics.

I'm not entirely convinced but I can still drag obscure pieces of maths from the depths of my ageing brain when needed (these days usually trig functions for 3D print designs).

Exactly that ...

plus, it forced you to pay attention, rather then to think you'd have the printouts of the ppt so you can sleep through the lecture ...

Sheesh, whatever happened to bumming the course notes from your fellow students in exchnage for a few beers because you happened to miss the early morning class .... usually because someone had bummed your notes in exchange for a few beers the night before ....

Besides that ..

you had monitors ?

Luxury ...

we had a teacher who made handwritten notes on the blackboard

in about as legible a handwriting as my own

and who kept talking while making these notes

which meant he had his back to the class, and was even less comprehensible then

Copying down notes does indeed help you remember, but what goes along with that is that the lecturer should also be writing the material on a blackboard, to match the rate at which students can copy it.

it just seems like such a waste of time though.

(they could have read / recopied those notes as last weeks homework)

Face to face teacher student time is valuable and should be spent teaching / interacting , not both teacher and students doing a shit impression of the worlds slowest fax machine

The idea of copying it is that it's meant to help you remember it. It was for the benefit of the student.

Whether that has any merit or not I don't have any idea, but I hope this petty little man got what was coming to him.

I handwrite copious amounts of notes on things I am studying. But, there is a rule: Fast, Accurate, Readable. Pick any 2.

Depends upon the subject matter and the speed of the lecturer. Some have just wizzed through with barely a thought to the student. Others take time and one can take in the topic - and make notes. Not always the SME the best one to teach in a classroom environment.

Or better still, go the Open University route and largely drop the lecturer and give the student ample material to draw their own conclusion from.

"I handwrite copious amounts of notes on things I am studying. But, there is a rule: Fast, Accurate, Readable. Pick any 2."

Amen to this and have an upvote !

My astronomy teacher at university taught that to me the hard way:

- he was blasting through the board, while moving and hiding various parts of the board

- we had to fast copy like crazy to the visible part of the board, changing cadrans each dozens of seconds

End of the day, accurate, check, fast, yes of course. Readable, fuck no !

Just after a house move, I had a shopping list, quite long and diverse, because I wrote it all down, I remembered every item at the store while the list was on the kitchen table.

If you write your shopping list on the palm of your hand, you won't forget it.

Plus you get to look like a lunatic while walking around Morrisons staring at your palm like a demented priest reading from an imaginary bible.

Most of the list is the same each week - milk, bread, quicklime

Just get that lot tattooed on your wrist and cross the items off with felt-tip.

Tell anyone noticing that you're counting The Silence.

rolled up carpet, cattle prod...

"College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either."

Mark Twain

I once got a critical leve support call from our data centre telling me that a system had gone wrong and it needed fixing immediately or heads would be rolling. The symprtoms wre that all of the system menus were blank apart from the headings. I jumped in a taxi with all of my support tools and headed up there to discover that they had had somebody in cleaning the keyboards and monitors (an annual event) and the person doing it had managed to turn down the brightness control on the CRT monitor. The menu headings were in high intensity, with the menu options in lower intensity. It had been turned down enough to hide the low intensity text, but you could still see the high intensity text.

I twiddled the knob, picked up my gear and took a taxi back.

(a) Attend a meeting without an agenda.

(b) Allow yourself to be sent on a course before checking the actual syllabus.

Learning is helped by knowing where to attach knowledge to existing knowledge. Having the overview from a proper syllabus clarifies this. It also means that you say to whoever trying to send you on a day/week/month of tedium "I know all this." Save the money and give me time off. Alternatively you might do some background reading or other preparation.

Economics class - I took, over the course of the semester, 3/4 of one page of notes. P.W. on my right took two full spiral notebooks worth of notes. O.G. on my left took one full notebook worth of notes. The difference between the two was down to, I think, handwriting size. Before the exam, O.G. asked for my notes, to comare with his notes, to make sure he hadn't missed anything. When I handed him the sheet of paper, he laughed, handed it back, and leaned forward to ask P.W. for her notes. I don't know if it helped but I still got better marks in that course than either of them.