taking notes

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I breezed through high school without ever needing to learn how to take notes or study.

This was not good -- college was a lot harder than it would have been, if I'd had a clue how to work at learning stuff.  As it was, I sort of figured it out on my own, but never felt really comfortable that I had a handle on ways of enabling deliberate learning of stuff that didn't come naturally.

In the intervening years, I've read several times that the act of taking notes is useful for retaining information.

I took copious notes for Model Thinking.  Maybe more notes than I took the entire time I was working on my BA!

The checkered book had some stuff in it before I took the class.  I cut that out and pitched it, which is irrelevant, except to say the book was not entirely available to use.  And the second book is not filled up entirely, but mostly.

I never developed a system for taking notes, before, so I was starting from scratch.  I bought a bunch of stick-on tabs.  Purple is for section beginnings, yellow is for vocabulary, orange is for questions I had, and blue is for readings.

You can see that my tab usage changed, over time.

I found the purple section-heading tabs to be very useful. When I was looking for something specific, I could find that part of my notes more easily, given the purple tabs.

The yellow vocabulary tabs were pretty much useless.  I discovered that what I needed to do, so I could actually FIND things, was put the vocabulary (along with explanations and section numbers) into a spreadsheet, so I could alphabetize it *or* see it in the order in which it was presented.

The readings mostly just repeated what was said in the lectures (with more math).  I started skimming them, rather than taking notes on them.

 I still used the orange tabs, but gave up on getting answers to my questions.  When there are 92,000 of you in class, you can't expect to get answers to your own personal questions...................

Notice how they are bunched -- there was one section I found to be particularly opaque...........

Moving onward.  Another composition book, with my handy Chinese food container, corralling note-taking aids.

I mark section topics and important stuff in purple.

I mark my own personal statements in green.  This helps me keep track of what *he* said vs what *I* said.  Not that it's hard to tell in the case of "as if," but sometimes I want to keep straight that something is my synopsis or commentary (just in case I'm wrong!).  I put quotes around statements that are direct quotes from either the slides or the lecture.

(It's interesting -- and predictable, when you think about it... -- that the Think Again prof is very precise in his language.  He never says "quotes" when he means "quotation marks".....)

I still mark vocabulary with yellow, but don't bother with tabs.  After several lectures, I go back and put the vocabulary into a spreadsheet.  I found this to be good review for exams, in Model Thinking.

In the whole of Model Thinking, there was only one thing I had to go back to a video to check.  Everything else I needed to look up was in my notes.

Yay.

Old dogs CAN learn new tricks.

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