Take Notes

Supercharge Your Learning & Save Time

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Your class is an hour long. In that class your instructor is going to cover some important concepts. You should know they are important because time is very limited, and most educators are going to prioritize material you must know! Less important details can be gleaned from assigned readings but, rest assured, what’s covered in class is the top stuff to learn. The most important material is being served to you on a shiny platter with stars and exclamation points to let you know that these are the foundational things to understand. Many recognize class time (any class time) for this value while many more do not.  

You have choices about how to use the scheduled class or lecture time ahead of you. You could listen with half an ear while you fiddle with a distraction (social media, pet capybara, a game app, etc.); you could listen attentively but passively (notice that passive listening almost always leads to fiddling with a distraction); or you can actively listen by taking notes.

Only one of these approaches makes good use of your class session for which you have already made time in your schedule. The other two are a waste of time. Not only do you miss your first and best opportunity for learning the most essential concepts of any particular subject, you now have to find time in your schedule in which you must be your own tutor by trying to figure out what is important and why they need to know it. This “I’ll eventually figure it out” approach is common, but it is a massive waste of time.  

Many argue that they don’t need to focus carefully on in-class material if it is also covered in the textbook or in assigned readings. By this reasoning, why not save time and money by abandoning every formal academic scenario and becoming entirely self-educated? It is true that some subjects lend themselves to self-teaching. Others do not. If you want a good return on your time investment, your educator will prioritize the most important material and then explore a variety of ways to help you best understand that material in context.

Many argue that they plan to listen in class but don’t feel they want to take notes because they aren’t very fast at taking notes or maybe their handwriting isn’t very tidy. This is like saying you are going to wait to learn essential skills until after you’ve been added to the Olympic team in that skill. You don’t start on the first day with good reflexes and strong muscles in a sport. You won’t start note-taking on day one with neat, speedy, and organized words. You only get faster and more efficient at taking notes by taking notes. Sloppy handwriting is not a problem. If you are taking notes properly you can be certain that your writing is sloppy because you are keeping pace with the material and you know this isn’t the final set of notes on the material.

Taking notes in class is the fastest way to understand material and then internalize what you are hearing because you are forcing yourself to hear, process, consider, think, and organize the words necessary to summarize what you are seeing and hearing in class. Taking notes by hand forces full brain engagement in the material being presented. This also works when you are reading an assigned texts, especially if you are summarizing what you have read into your needs or formulating more abbreviated definitions of terms and concepts. You must formulate a full thought and express it in such a way that makes sense to you and then write it out. There’s a Latin phrase that holds true in this discussion: to teach is to learn. When you take notes, you are teaching yourself and learning well.  

Taking notes by hand is also the best way to stay attuned to the material presented. We are all prone to losing focus when any distraction pops up. Maybe your cat walks in and begs for treats reminding you to move your stuff out of the cat’s favorite spot but now he wants a treat and look at how his water bowl is empty and let’s get him to play with his new toy and then…wait, what did the teacher just say about this week’s quiz? Making a habit of notetaking means our hands are full, our eyes are on task, and our brains are meaningfully engaged even if we might still have the cat in the room who plans to take a nap in his favorite spot even if you don’t move your stuff.

What’s the best way to learn by taking notes?

1. Don’t prioritize material as note-worthy or not until after you’ve finished the class. Just take notes anyway. Evaluations can come later. For now, stay attuned to what is being said by jotting notes down non-stop. During a lecture, staying focused is half the battle.
   
2. Don’t try to copy anything verbatim unless your lecturer makes it very clear that verbatim is important. Instead, listen for keywords, terms/definitions, proper nouns, specific ways of explaining tricky topics. If you have a good educator, he or she will repeat important things a couple of different ways so get down a few anchor notes and then flesh things out a bit more as your understanding expands. Leaving extra line spaces and wide margins will help you add things back in later if you hear it explained in more than one way.
3. Notes need not be limited to words! Include arrows, asterisks, underlines, colors, doodles, or whatever system you like to use to indicate priority or process. Some take notes like a rough loose flowchart while others take notes more formally with traditional outline techniques. Both do the job.
4. Always recopy your notes after class meets or the lecture ends. Keep a loose-leaf binder with a stack of lined paper for taking notes during class and a separate notebook or binder for recopying them later. Why recopy? You will forget 50% of what you heard in class within 24 hours. If you recopy your notes but flesh them out by writing more complete sentences or with added material from your readings or charts from the textbook with formatting or colors for important terms, you will have more than half-finished your studying for any quiz or exam that comes your way. You will have engaged your brain to listen and write and then analyze and write once again while the thoughts are still fresh. If you recopy notes soon after the lecture, you’ll accomplish this step very quickly. If you wait, you’ll have to spend more time remembering. Your choice.
5. Even if you borrow somebody’s notes to prepare for an exam, it is essential that you recopy them for yourself. Writing things out allows our brains time to process and absorb new information easily.  
6. If you struggle to increase speed when taking notes, consider acquiring the skill of writing in cursive, a writing style that was designed to add speed to writing by hand. Printing is the slowest way to write anything. 
   

Taking notes is an intense study method that will accommodate full mastery of nearly anything you hear or read. It is something that almost anyone can do and at any age. It is a suitable complement to any preferred learning style. Focused note-taking requires no additional class time. Compared to somebody who chooses distracted unengaged learning, you’ll spend much less total time recopying notes in preparation for any quiz or exam. Fail to take/recopy notes and you’ll spend much more time trying to teach yourself the material from scratch without the benefit or prioritized information.

Join forces with your skilled educator by taking notes. Your grades and subject mastery will greatly improve even as you spend less time working on the material at hand.

One Size Fits Few

Try Home Education À La Carte

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

If you are new to home education: Welcome! If you are thinking about it but haven’t committed to the process, maybe this piece will help. We will discuss whether a comprehensive home school curriculum is right for your family or if à la carte is the better option. As a savvy reader, you might already suspect where my opinions lean so here I’ll offer some observations from the standpoint of a quarter century teaching my own kids plus a few more on top of that teaching everyone else’s kids as well. 

If you’ve never been to a major home education conference, add one to your schedule this coming spring or summer. Assume you’ll be overwhelmed by the flood of home education information and prepare to pace yourself. Attending all days of the conference will give you time to collect information, browse, attend sessions, and browse the vendor hall several times more. When we attend as vendors for The Lukeion Project, we regularly have new home educators stop by our booth. We can tell they are new to the process because they look a little shell-shocked. Most have no idea there are so many options available for educational help. 

Home school vendors can be like any other salespersons. They sometimes create a need and then offer to fill it for you. With new home educators looking for so many answers at once, they’ll suggest that it is preferable to buy into a system that is a one-size-fits-all curriculum to solve all education concerns for every child throughout his 12+ years of study. This notion is, of course, ridiculous if you’ve ever met any actual children. I only had three to educate and they couldn’t be more different. Being able to customize what they learned and when they learned it was the most important virtue in their home school experience.  
A one-size-fits-all education is a major drawback of an institutional education. Only the slenderest slice of pie on the pie chart of educational styles will claim robust triumph in an institution. A far larger part of the pie chart represents students that merely learned how to function in such a system. These usually graduate with only a few bright moments of inspiration and insight aside from that rare class and maybe a senior trip. An equally large slice on that chart represents students who languished entirely. There’s a good chance that even our best and brightest could have been even better and brighter in an educational system that allowed for customization. 

12-years of education-in-a-box is not going to inspire anyone, yet the most lucrative educational companies out there are the glitzy programs that sell a full year’s grade level in a complete package, usually with claims that their approach is both super convenient for parents and a delight to all children, regardless of their age or interests.  If you look closely, you’ll see that these programs especially target families with younger kids because families that continue to home school through middle/high school will certainly move to a more à la care approach or give up. 

Why do they target new-to-home-school families? These comprehensive year-in-a-box style curriculum approaches are like gummy multivitamins for kids. They are advertised as a product that has everything a body needs but you will mostly pay for pretty colors and nice packaging to help convince your child to swallow it. They will try to convince parents that such programs are “the only way to be sure” that their child gets everything she needs. Moms are easy prey to this approach. Natural insecurities are targeted by big box curricula vendors who suggest that there’s one right way to educate and one acceptable body of knowledge a child must master if he will be able to move forward and succeed in life. Big box curricula companies prey on our fears that we are not up to the task of educating our own children.

If you wander a vendor hall at any major home school conference, you’ll see more and more products that are marketed to busy parents who don’t have time to prepare. This is a safe marketing approach because I have yet to meet a modern parent who finds enough time in the day to finish all that must be done. I have even seen literature curricula advertised as requiring zero parental knowledge of every reading any literature. Plug-and-play curriculum is becoming more common because, again, there are lots of insecurities among educators worried their child is missing something. 

You are still an excellent candidate for an à la carte approach, even if you aren’t the one who teaches every minute of your child’s education. If your child is set on mastering an entirely foreign-to-you subject, then an approach that requires minimal parent preparation is probably a good idea. I would hate to think what would have happened to my children’s various passions had it been entirely up to me to prepare and teach them rock-climbing, piano, French, blacksmithing, and chemistry. 

Busy or not, all of us must read to our kids, gently teach them essential life skills, manners, basic art skills, writing, music basics, money management, and math, all while conveying our own worthwhile passions (gardening, cooking, golfing, sports, dancing, etc.). Why out-source the next level? Many newbies are led to believe there is some scientifically devised body of knowledge that stands above these basics in the elementary years. They assume that this fictional “scientifically devised body of knowledge” is expertly instructed in a formal institution and that some scientifically approved group of officials have pronounced their blessings on such curriculum and stamped it with accreditation, a word that sounds more substantial and important than it is prior to one’s college years.

À La Carte Education

Most first timers who buy year-in-a-box approaches will start their school year with enthusiasm. They have colorful textbooks, a stack of workbooks, some art supplies plus a few clever math manipulatives. They are ready to go. If I had ever tried big-box-curriculum, my kids would have gotten started with the subjects they like first. By the end of the first week, my math-loving son would have already finished most of his math for the first semester. He’d have tucked anything requiring creative writing under his already tattered pile of workbooks. My oldest would have finished a full year’s collection of creative assignments and would be regarding her math book with fear and loathing hoping it would disappear. My youngest would have abandoned all of it and would be working through his latest piece on the piano. He might have graduated from college with honors, but you couldn’t tell he’d turn out that way as a youth. He was allergic to anything that gave even a whiff of being overly simplified for child-consumption. He only wanted to work with materials of substance and weight. 

Creating a customized approach to all major subjects one at a time, a child at a time, is the à la carte educational approach that I recommend. This might mean that the math approach I’d picked for my son’s 9th grade year might only serve him for the first 2 months and then he’d be ready for the next thing (and I’d have to find an entirely different approach for my two creatives). My oldest would be given time in the day to draw, paint, and be artistic requiring little more than access to good music and art supplies. My youngest needed to blow off steam by playing on the piano whenever he needed to work on subjects he didn’t enjoy (I’m looking at you, math) but he might spend a couple of days “wasting” time reading ancient philosophy or figuring out how to tie knots in survival scenarios.

“But how do you know they are learning everything they need to know?” you might ask.

Rest assured that any reasonably conscientious home school educator is doing an equal or (usually) superior job compared to any standard curriculum approach in an institution (yes, even the really expensive ones). But if you are doing it right, you are not educating alone in a vacuum on a desert island. Others should be brought alongside the educational process to help flesh out a completely customized experience for your totally unique learner. The most important person to come alongside you in educating your child will be your child himself.

Many colleges prefer home educated students today because they have read real literature, learned to write in both creative and academic contexts, and they tend to be autodidacts because they learn how to learn. As a full-time educator of a variety of different types of students (public, private, home-schooled, unschooled), we find that students who have been conventionally schooled (either public or private) seriously struggle in scenarios that require them to take ownership over academic material. We have to walk them through managing even basic elements of maintaining their own learning experience. Even conventionally schooled gifted students struggle in this area because in most conventional programs (small or large, prestigious, or mundane), education is something that is done to you rather than something that you own and do for yourself and do on your own behalf.

Students who take ownership in their own education learn they can speed or slow their pace on subjects based on the intensity and quality of their efforts. They discover they can seek out and successfully take on more difficult subjects in areas that they enjoy because they’ll do what they must to move forward and achieve their own goals. They learn that it is better to go back and re-learn the basics in areas that are important to their own academic plans rather than check a box that a subject is done. If their goals are less academic and more hands-on, owning their own education means they’ll start real work in areas they love sooner, not later. Metalworking, music, drama, woodworking, cooking, working with animals? All of this can start much earlier in a child’s life when mom or dad have allowed --and even designed—all of that to be part of their child’s education.