[Note-taking] Teaching notes

As I mentioned earlier in the week I was going to do a piece on teaching notes before I started babbling on about GradeGuru which I think this appropriately fits in with.

The tutors always seem to have these “perfect” template of notes – that they absolutely refuse to let you see or get copies off. They are both for lectures and workshops – and the reason they don’t let you have them is because if we did, we’d have no reason to need them – the odds are they aren’t teaching us any more that what is contained in those notes.

GradeGuru was all about sharing notes and collaboration between students. If someone shared such notes – everyone would be passing with flying colours – particularly in open book exams such as those we have on the LPC.

I’ve recently noticed that when I know I am going to be taking notes for someone else I put in a great deal more effort into those notes. A friend had a firm event in London, asked me to cover our horribly late lecture, and pass her the notes. Knowing that if I didn’t give her good quality notes she’d lose out, I took a higher standard of notes than I would have had it just been for me (at 6pm after a full day who is really concentrating anyway?). So it made me think – if I tried to get into the mindset that I would be “teaching” people from my notes and effectively trying to create my own set of teaching notes – the quality of my actual notes would increase. They would of course not match the perfection of actual teaching notes, but would still be an improvement on my notes – for the benefit of my studies. Which in no way is a bad thing.

Teaching notes of course is not about getting the fullest information – but the most important (teachers will always add in the general interest aspects to try and spice up the dullest of topics). It should be a piece of paper (or more than one for the chunkier topics) that consolidates all your understanding of a particular topic. The actual content will vary depending on the topic: but it should be the mechanics of it and how it interrelates to the rest of the course.

I hear you say why is this different from the 30days note taking or the revision note taking you normally do – the idea is this is not for revision. This is for getting the most out of the classes you have left so you don’t have to revise for them. We have classes up until a week before the exams, it is a hard thing to absorb new information as well as revise the old. Teaching notes allows you to do more comprehensive notes at the time, write them up while they are fresh in your head (which most of us aspire to do the majority of the time anyway, but fail) and complete the topic in full – leaving little need to go back at the crunch time.

So in summary – play tricks on your mind, pretend that your notes are destined for greater and better things than passing the exam to create better notes NOW to save on revision time later.