STUDENTS, STOP TAKING NOTES. TEACHERS, STOP ASKING THEM TO.
I originally wrote this post nearly a decade ago, and I believe it more firmly than ever.
This, from Seth Godin, is really good. In it, he touches on everything I hate about every teacher whose class I ever hated, and everything I aspire to be in a teacher. Although the post is aimed at business professionals, there's a parallel between what a salesman armed with a projector and what a teacher armed with a projector both aim to do.
Some of the ideas are technical, and others will be obvious to many readers. But even the obvious points are the kind of obvious that teachers often ignore, just to make life easier on ourselves. some of us keep reading from the pre-packaged slideshows that come with the curriculum, trying hard not to think about the fact that if that's all we're going to do, anybody could do our job.
The best moment of the post comes when Godin encourages speakers to be:
Too breathtaking to take notes. If people are ...writing down what you're saying, I wonder if your presentation is everything it could be. After all, you could have saved everyone the trouble and just [written it down] for them, right? We've been trained since youth to replace paying attention with taking notes. That's a shame. Your actions should demand attention (hint: bullets demand note-taking. The minute you put bullets on the screen, you are announcing, "write this down, but don't really pay attention now.") People don't take notes when they go to the opera.
There is nothing that makes me crazy like the teacher meetings I go to every year in which I'm given a handout, which is identical to a slide presentation, which is word for word what the man on the stage is mumbling. When I make the news, it will be for throwing the mumbler's projector out the window and forcing him to eat his godforsaken verbatim papers.
But American classrooms are full of teachers conditioning students to think that "learning" means "writing down a thing somebody said and trying very hard to memorize it."
I routinely have to tell students:
"Stop trying to write down every word I'm saying. Do you take notes at lunch? No? But do you remember what you talked about at lunch? Yes? Why? Because you were paying attention. You were engaged. You were consciously, intentionally present.
A good way to kill a party is to say "I'm gonna write everything down so we can remember this night forever. Could you repeat the joke you just told?"
A good way to end a conversation is to take copious notes and keep asking the other party "Will I need to remember this later? And could you spell that? How much do you want me to remember that line you just said?"
But mindless transcription is precisely what many teachers train their students for.
It's not that I am against lecture. I have learned a great deal from teachers (like Dr. Joe March at UAB) who make a habit of honoring their students enough to be truly great at giving them information.
It's always easier to write a paragraph on a slide than it is to boil it down to three essential words.
A handout is always easier than a lecture.
A page number is always easier than an actual answer.
A talkaround is always easier than an honest "I don't know."
A good class is a conversation. And no one really takes a lot of notes on a conversation.
This isn't to say that no student should ever write anything down; a couple of years ago, I went on a fishing trip to Canada with four of my best friends. I spent the week jotting notes down in quiet moments--mostly making sure the moments of hilarity would be preserved for eternity. Good note-taking has two key qualities:
- Good note-taking is unobtrusive; i.e., it doesn't require constant interruption.
- Good note-taking is not constant transcription; it is the highlights necessary to remember content, rather than the content itself.
I tell my students to think of notes as coat-hangers. You're not trying to draw every item of clothing in the closet; you're just trying to get some fixed points in the wall for future knowledge to hang from. For some, that means drawing pictures. For some, that means bulleted lists. For some, it means underlining in a book. For some, that means simply listening.
For all, though, this general rule applies: the better the speaker is, the fewer notes are required. Nobody takes notes at their favorite movie. Be the favorite movie.
For the full text of Godin's article, click here.
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