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.

For the Love of Literature:

Why Spend an Entire Semester on Tolkien?

By Randee Baty with The Lukeion Project

This spring, the Lukeion Project will be offering an entire semester on the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien. There's still time to register. Many of our students enjoy Tolkien as their fun, leisure reading, and some may wonder
whether his work deserves time spent in academic study. Will prospective colleges take that high school english credit seriously? Over 30 prominent colleges and university in the United States, including Rice, Rutgers, Purdue, Villanova, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all think it deserves enough study to either give Tolkien’s writings a complete course of their own or have made them a prominent part of classes on either epic literature or medieval literature. Many others have had seminars or workshops on his writing, and many of those are at the graduate level. The University of Texas at Austin and Cal State, Northridge have given class time and study to this prominent author. Oxford University, Tolkien’s long time scholarly home, offers all types of classes on the writing of Tolkien.

When literature teachers talk about why we study literature, we mention ideas such as “universal truths,” “studying the human condition,” beauty of the language,” and “enduring effects on the reader.”  We can talk about themes, aesthetic qualities, symbolism, and characterization. We discuss how literature can put us in the shoes of people we will never meet, take us to places we can never go, and gives us both sympathy and empathy for others. The list of what great literature brings us is almost endless, and all of these can be found and studied in Tolkien’s writings without doubt. But they can be found in other authors also, so why does Tolkien merit this type of study? Here are my ideas on that subject.

J.R.R. Tolkien was not just a author of extraordinary fiction, but a preeminent literary scholar and critic. His essay “The Monsters and the Critics” changed the direction of studies and criticism on Beowulf for scholars ever since its publication. Seamus Haney, the former Poet Laureate of Ireland, praised his scholarship on Beowulf and other scholars have called his work “the most important article ever written about the poem.” His study of Beowulf strongly influenced The Hobbit as well as his other writings. Beowulf is a standard text for any college literature class because it is the first epic we have in English, and Tolkien’s study and scholarship on the poem are worth studying.

Tolkien’s own areas of study included Philology (Greek and Latin), Old English, Middle English, Norse Mythology, Medieval Literature, Anglo-Saxon Culture and Literature, and several others. Philology was his main interest and his strong scholarship in this area permeates all the writings he published. In studying Tolkien, we are given access to one of the finest minds in the development of languages that has ever published. 

In the course of his studies, Tolkien, along with E.V. Gordon, translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Middle English. His translation is the most well-known and used translation of that Medieval Classic. He also began The Fall of Arthur, a Arthurian legend written in alliterative form, using Old English meter and based on Medieval legends. 

In studying the work of Tolkien, students are exposed to elements of all the interests Tolkien studies throughout his long and distinguished academic career. This includes the history of the Ango-Saxon culture as many of his creations, such as the Riders of Rohan, are based on Anglo-Saxon history and society, and the mythologies of many different countries, not just the Norse mythology that he was known to have loved. Germanic myths and legends also figure prominently. 

While many fan publications exist over the writings of Tolkien, a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal is also published. Tolkien Studies, published by the University of West Virginia Press has been publication since 2004. 

Students spending a semester with Tolkien will have the opportunity to analyze poetry, do close readings on narrative passages, delve into independent research on such topics as portrayals of Anglo-Saxon culture in Tolkien’s writings, and write character analyses. They may write word studies, comparative literature papers, or philosophical essays. The possibilities are endless, and the work can be rigorous while still being appealing for students.

If you are looking for an English or literature class that is highly academic while fun and engaging, think about a semester of Tolkien studies. 

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you
don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”