I had a psych teacher that used to picture everyone’s head as a test tube rack full of test tubes. As he lectured, the students would have their heads pointed down (to take notes) and he imagined his words filling up the test tubes. When it was test time, the students would look down at the test paper thus spilling everything he said out of the test tubes, onto the paper. Unprocessed, just spit back out.
Now what he does, or at least what he was doing when I had him as a teacher a few years ago is to hand out the lecture notes. At the beginning of each chapter he’d hand out the notes in a nice outline format. It was the same notes he uses to lecture with. They already came with three holes punched in them and you’d stick them in your three ring binder. This way instead of madly writing down notes, you could follow along with the lecture and get involved with what he was saying. The only time you had to write something is if you had to jot down some extra notes. It really worked out quite well.
I had Professor Cole in my first year at Georgetown. I found him to be a great lecturer, responsive and respectful of students and without hint of derision. He was one of a handful of professors with whom I felt it was an honor to be in his class.
His lectures were engaging, easy to follow, and given the conversational tone and dialogue-like approach, they lent themselves to thematic observations. His was not a fact-heavy class (e.g., Civil Procedure) where details were of heightened importance. He is correct in that those who furiously typed out a transcript of the class were likely missing the forest.
I bring this up in an attempt to deflect some of the suggestions that he should keep things “interesting.” Of course, YMMV, and if Gadarene stops in (we were classmates, so he will have similar experience) he may disagree. (Of course, if he counters with Professor A, I may have to drag him to the pit )
Professor Cole is correct in that sitting behind someone who has solitaire or a flash-heavy webpage open is incredibly distracting, annoying, and rude. However, I felt the ability to occasionally look up cases and whatnot was useful to the classroom experience. Again, YMMV.
I am glad, however, that he did not take this approach when I was there. An outright ban is overkill, and penalizes the majority of note-takers for the shortcomings of the (albeit significant) minority.
I never studied law & my college classes were back in the Bronze Age. But, on reviewing my papyrus scrolls, I find summaries, concepts & a few details. Nothing “verbatin.” (And, in far too many classes, “blah, blah, blah.”)
Sounds as though Professor Cole minimizes the “blah.”
I’m inclined to agree with the OP’s professor. My lecture notes usually take up a third of a page, consist mostly of idea-diagrams with arrows pointing from one idea-phrase to another, with occasonal lists of categories or terms. The main salient points I don’t need to write down: I just heard them and either I now know that or I’ve got my hand up in the air to ask “Could you go back and elaborate on what you said about the sodium and lithium?”
I tend to assume people writing down everything verbatim aren’t listening for content, they’re transcribing and will go home and memorize without understanding, and will regurgitate onto a test without ever having allowed a scintilla of the material to enter their conscousness as anything other than a string of phrases, swallowed whole for short-term retention.
There are many different learning styles and therefore no ‘best’ way for people to learn. If OP thinks ‘verbatim’ note-taking works best, then he should be able to take verbatim notes. The prof shouldn’t be permitted to dictate how people are supposed to learn. OtakuLoki, hunt up a few authoritative articles on learning styles (you’ll find them in educational psych reference sources) and hand them to the prof.
That’s very true. Everyone does learn differently.
I was the type of student that always copied my notes over. My notes were a mess and rewriting them was really a great way to study for me. If I had the tape recorder, I went over my notes and added what I missed. That was a way that I learned.
I had an embryology professor that gave detailed essay questions and would take a huge amount of points off if you missed one tiny detail. She didn’t really teach from the book and half the time she forgot what she mentioned. More than once I went to her with my tape if she deducted points because she forgot to mention something and took points off.
I was able to pay attention more to the lecture when I knew I had the tape as a backup. They also helped me for exams.
I have seen reports of two major studies that show that notetaking during a lecture is a bad idea. (Something that I and a lot of other people I know had known all along.)
The 2nd study was done at Harvard and one of the researchers went on “The Today Show” and was interviewed by Katie Couric. Poor Katie hadn’t read the notes well enough before the interview and was gobsmacked when the researcher had to point out that notetaking was bad and not good. She just couldn’t get her head around it.
There is absolutely no point in attending a lecture if you are not go to pay attention. Notetaking is only slightly better than sleeping during a lecture.
Well, I agree with you that there is absolutely no point in attending a lecture if you are not going to pay attention, but I disagree that notetaking is a bad idea. Specifically, I disagree that notetaking is a bad thing in a law class. What else are you going to cram from? A casebook? Commercial outlines? (which are fine, but usually have wayyyy too much information and a different, potentially incompatible vocabulary to your professor).
Let’s say you’re in first-year torts, doing something easy. Like battery. You’ve read the case and your professor starts drilling someone on it. There are nuances to that case, and throwaway comments that you need to get down - because they will probably be a wrinkle on a test. Then you have to get the black-letter law down in your teacher’s vocabulary (nothing they hate worse than reading black-letter law you cribbed from some commercial outline). So you’ve got all the elements of battery, definitions of those elements, examples of what fits under each element, nuances to the case(s) you discussed that day, and throwaway comments that could be the difference between an A and a B. Stuff that during finals week, you’re going to have to learn like the back of your hand.
And you don’t write any of that down. And then you go to another class and repeat except in a different subject. And another and another. All semester long.
Is this your way of saying that law professors don’t actually teach, nor do they read the test answers & papers generated by their students for content, but instead rely exclusively on memorize-and-regurgitate?
My assumptions as a teacher would be:
a) If you answer my questions all in my words, that probably means you don’t know the meaning of what I said and therefore aren’t capable of expressing it in your own words;
b) If you’re transcribing what I’m saying in class, you aren’t concentrating on the questions that I’m asking or the implications of the points I’m making. It puts you in passive mode, sponge mode. I’m waiting for you to interrupt and contradict me (I’m the professor, I’m allowed to troll ;)) and you should not assume that what I’m presenting are “facts”.
c) While law is not at all my venue and never has been, my attitude is that any course of study in which students are expected to memorize quantities of material that no one realistically expects them to keep memorized permanent are just hazing the students, deliberately making them miserable so as to drive as many as possible out of the program. I’m not saying law is like that, but I’m curious to know whether the typical attorney 10 years in practice post bar-exam can still rattle this stuff off (and needs to be able to) or if most of them just look it up if they need it (or could if they had not been made to memorize it).
d) Again, while law is not my area, I think if I were teaching law I would be less interested in whether or not you could list in a, b, c order verbatim the arguments made in Smith v Bubblefuck than in the ways in which Smithis a turning point establishing that a prior contract isn’t enforceable if yadda yadda, what the implications of that being established are, how the ramifications would be different were that not so, strategically how that established jurisprudence might be elabored upon, modified, overturned, overruled at a higher or more-encompassing level, etc, and again strategically who is tending to try to build upon that foundation and towards what end, i.e, where are you most likely to encounter it being cited and what are the most likely counterarguments you’d be likely encounter in such cases. Maybe in order to be able to discuss that you first need a rich layer of memorized case law, but still, the emphasis on memorizing and regurgitating makes it sound more like hazing and dreary mindless cramming.
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