taking notes from a lecture

[Kate in Arabia]

Is this a skill you teach and if so how do you go about it? Ds is pretty good about notes from a text, but I have not yet had him take notes from a lecture. I'm looking at several lectures I'd like to try for next year, he really enjoys listening to lectures in general, and I'm considering trying to get him to take some notes... but I'm also afraid of killing his enjoyment, kwim?

 

How do you address this, if you do?

[klmama]

Some of our science videos this year had fill-in-the-blank lecture notes. It was a good way to get ds started on note-taking without him having to decide what was most important.

 

Also, I had him copy from the board the things I wrote when reviewing the history timeline.

 

Next year, we will start taking notes from audio lectures without fill-in-the blank sheets. I'll take notes, too, and we'll compare at the end of every lecture to see what was missed and why it might matter.

[regentrude]

When DD took her first college class, she had lectures to listen to and notes to take, and could figure out how do to it. We did find that easy to do.

If you do not have the opportunity for live lectures, OpenCourseware would work as well.

Teaching Company lectures are not ideal because they lack visuals; in a real college lecture the professor will write the most important things on the board, which makes note taking much easier.

[mazakaal]

I'm a newbie at all this, but I'll tell you what I've done this year. Take it with a grain of salt because it's not tried and tested. :001_smile:

 

14yo ds is studying medieval history this year with MOH 2. I bought the 36-lesson Teaching Company set on medieval history. We watched the first 10 or so lectures together, both of us taking notes. Then I had ds tell me what notes he had taken and I did the same with my notes so he could get an idea of what he had done well and what he maybe missed. He's just finished MOH and for the rest of the year he is to watch one TTC dvd per day and take notes on his own. Then he has to, from his notes, tell me what the lecture was about, not just, "It was about King Arthur," but with more details, summarizing the main points.

 

So far I think he's learned a lot. He needs to develop the skill more, but I feel like he's doing a lot better than he was in September.

[Jane in NC]

My son's first notetaking practice was also with Teaching Company lectures.

One idea is to consider the Cornell Notetaking System.


This breaks up a full page into sections which may seem less intimidating to a student who is doing this for the first time.

[swimmermom3]

When DD took her first college class, she had lectures to listen to and notes to take, and could figure out how do to it. We did find that easy to do.

If you do not have the opportunity for live lectures, OpenCourseware would work as well.

Teaching Company lectures are not ideal because they lack visuals; in a real college lecture the professor will write the most important things on the board, which makes note taking much easier.

 

My son just discovered the joy of OpenCourseware. He is an experienced Teaching Company viewer so he was a bit surprised at how easily he was able to take notes in a "classroom setting." I carved some time out of our regular lit and composition work and let my son choose a lecture series that he was interested in. We talked about the cues that a professor will give the student to let them know what is important. Then I let him do it on his own. He had to retell me the gist of the lecture afterwards. I then watch the lecture and check his notes.

 

The reason that I do not watch and take notes with my son is that I want him thinking for himself. He needs to be writing because he thinks the information is important, not because his mother is madly scribbling away. His thought process is different than mine. It's cleaner, more linear, more concise.

 

I did teach him about Cornell notes, but honestly, after 18 years in school, the best note taking advice I can give him is to be quick and clear and to review the notes right after class while your mind can still fill in gaps your hand missed.

[regentrude]

I did teach him about Cornell notes, but honestly, after 18 years in school, the best note taking advice I can give him is to be quick and clear and to review the notes right after class while your mind can still fill in gaps your hand missed.

 

I have a hard time seeing how Cornell notes could possibly work for math and sciences. I find the rigid page structure very limiting, leaving too little room for sketches and calculations (plus, one page is not sufficient for a 50 minute lecture, and a summary at the end of the page may be impossible).

To be honest, I think none of my students would be able to accurately summarize on their own the main idea of the lecture until after they have done their homework problems - usually they will not grasp until then what the lecture really was all about.

Just wanted to mention this.

 

They may be a good tool for humanities, I would not know.

Edited June 4, 2012 by regentrude

[FaithManor]

We teach note taking, first making sure the student is adept at outlining.

 

Then we use short videotape lectures for those first few times. I stop the video every so often and prompt the student, "Did you catch that? Was that a main idea? Do you think this is information you will need to remember? etc." Dh and I are rather Socratic in our methodologies so the kids never hear, "Write this down." They get many leading questions to help them come to the correct conclusion.

 

I have them write summaries afterward based on their notes. I do not issue grades, but I do red ink them with comments. Each time it gets better. Once they are doing short lectures well, we move to longer ones.

 

I lecture once per week in chemistry and physics anyway and the kids have to have notetaking mastered by 10th grade in order to keep up with me. :D

According to DD, I apparently feel it is my job to fill ever possible second with an extraordinary amount of information and I test over a lot of it. Sheesh....I thought I was being perfectly reasonable. :glare:

 

Apparently I take after my music history professor....the smoke used to roll off our pencils in her class! :lol:

 

I've used opencourseware lectures from MIT, Great Course Lectures, documentaries on Netflix, etc. Additionally, our newest thing is to watch the museum schedules at the Detroit Insitute of Arts, Greenfield Village, Henry Ford Museum, and the DOW. They occasionally have guest lecturers on interesting art, science, and history topics and some of the lectures are free with admission. Henry Ford and Greenfield are not cheap so we can't do it often. But, the DOW and DIA are very reasonably priced. It's a great opportunity for the kids to learn to take notes off a live lecture without their mother giving them the "Are you NUTS??? Write this down!"eye! That eyeball is my least Socratic attribute! :biggrinjester:

 

I do think it's valuable. My dad has a heating/air conditioning business and he often sends his employees to seminars and workshops. He expects them to take well written notes that the other employees could benefit from and the notebooks are kept in the business. It's a good skill to master.

 

Faith

[Nan in Mass]

I seem to remember a thread about how to survive as a stem student in which all the good students said they had rewritten their lecture notes after the lecture.

 

I taught mine the Cornell format, but I'm not sure they use it. I think the writing a question or cue part is important but I think mine do that when they convert their notes and the textbook into flashcards to memorize. I know both of them prefer to put all the material on a big whiteboard so they can see it all at once.

 

Nan

[regentrude]

I seem to remember a thread about how to survive as a stem student in which all the good students said they had rewritten their lecture notes after the lecture.

 

:confused:

Not me, and not any of my friends; in fact, I do not recall anybody ever rewriting their notes after class.

As I said elsewhere, my original college lecture notes are such that I could take them as a manuscript and deliver the lectures myself to my students.

At least for math and physics, I do not see how rewriting the notes would possibly help; working different problems, modeling them on the lecture examples, is what creates the understanding.

 

We did write ourselves summaries of the whole semester's notes in preparation for the annual comprehensive oral examinations - a semester condensed into two pages. That was very helpful.

[Jane in NC]

I have a hard time seeing how Cornell notes could possibly work for math and sciences. I find the rigid page structure very limiting, leaving too little room for sketches and calculations (plus, one page is not sufficient for a 50 minute lecture, and a summary at the end of the page may be impossible).

To be honest, I think none of my students would be able to accurately summarize on their own the main idea of the lecture until after they have done their homework problems - usually they will not grasp until then what the lecture really was all about.

Just wanted to mention this.

 

They may be a good tool for humanities, I would not know.

 

Regentrude, I am a huge fan of graph paper in general, engineering paper in particular. The latter has graph paper on the reverse side which bleeds through the front. I say use whatever works for one's brain!

 

My son used the Cornell system for some of his TC lectures which were humanities based, an introductory concept for notetaking in general. For classes at the CC (science and humanities), he opted for loose leaf lined paper--he is not a fan of spiral notebooks. Notetaking came naturally for him.

 

Back at the CC he took Chemistry with one of his dyslexic friends who had problems with notetaking. He always made a copy of his notes for her so that she could fill in areas she had missed.

[regentrude]

Regentrude, I am a huge fan of graph paper in general, engineering paper in particular. The latter has graph paper on the reverse side which bleeds through the front. I say use whatever works for one's brain!.

 

Graph paper is great; I like it much better than lined paper.

 

I actually took all my college notes on lose leaf white paper with no lines whatsoever.

I numbered the pages consecutively, dated each page, punched them and put them in binders with a table of contents as a front page which was updated with every lecture.

I strongly dislike notebooks for class notes; they do not allow you to insert extra notes from reading or additional sources.

[swimmermom3]

I have a hard time seeing how Cornell notes could possibly work for math and sciences. I find the rigid page structure very limiting, leaving too little room for sketches and calculations (plus, one page is not sufficient for a 50 minute lecture, and a summary at the end of the page may be impossible).

To be honest, I think none of my students would be able to accurately summarize on their own the main idea of the lecture until after they have done their homework problems - usually they will not grasp until then what the lecture really was all about.

Just wanted to mention this.

 

They may be a good tool for humanities, I would not know.

 

:lol: Regentrude, I suspect we handle certain aspects of education in the same manner - although without the snark on your part.:tongue_smilie: I tell my youngest about things like "Cornell notes" and "close reading" so he knows the lingo, but since my eyes tend to roll around in my head during the discussion, he usually says, "So fine, but what do you do?"

 

I also have him watch lectures in the great room with some quiet activity around him. I have even texted him during a lecture. I don't really care how he takes notes as long as he gets the general content; I care that he is able to pay attention and is able to ignore distractions.

 

ETA: I worked as an undergraduate student and was pregnant and raising a toddler while in graduate school. My methodologies had to be quick and efficient to survive. I can't imagine reading everything three times, annotating the heck out of it or completely rewriting my notes afterwards. Like I said, I would review them quickly after class in case I missed something. I would never have made it out of school alive with all of the study procedures they teach kids now.

Edited June 4, 2012 by swimmermom3

[Nan in Mass]

I'll see if I can find the thread. It was a general impression I got, not a specific tabulation of posts, so perhaps I am off.

 

I didn't rewrite my notes either, except as a summary before tests. I rather agree about the problems. Many of my lectures weren't really anything that was worth copying over. My anthropology lectures were, but my notes for the math didn't need copying and many of the cs ones weren't really copiable.

 

Nan

 

ETA - It might have been this one: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259340&highlight=stem+notes . If not, I do remember that it was around that same time. I don't have time today to read through the thread and see if that is still the impression I get. Hopefully I'm not woefully misdirecting people.

Edited June 4, 2012 by Nan in Mass

[Nan in Mass]

I taught mine all sorts of things but told them over and over that what they were supposed to do was develop a method that worked for them and that everybody did this differently. Both seem to have developped their own individualized method. They both found it helpful to be taught different methods. I took it for granted that they could figure this out on their own like I did until I saw that they weren't and decided that maybe that was a bad assumption when they hadn't gone to school.

 

Nan

[regentrude]

:lol: Regentrude, I suspect we handle certain aspects of education in the same manner - although without the snark on your part.:tongue_smilie:

 

:confused: I did not mean to be snarky at all. Sorry if it came across like that.

 

It's that I really honestly do not know if Cornell notes work for humanities, because I never had to take any humanities classes at the university - that's why I limit my comments to STEM classes. I assume they must, because somebody came up with them, and math and physics is not where they work well.

[EKS]

I found that it was very difficult for my son to take notes from Teaching Company lectures as they are deisgned to go *very* quickly, not the way a lecture would in a classroom setting.

[Kate in Arabia]

Thank you so much for this discussion -- I'm taking (mental) notes! ;)

[Jane in NC]

Thank you so much for this discussion -- I'm taking (mental) notes! ;)

 

Maybe a mind map would work in this case. :D

[Nan in Mass]

Haha!

[1Togo]

I've been teaching our children Cornell notetaking for many years. Cornell works well for humanities lectures. However, we don't include the summary portion. Instead, we use the format as a quick way of outlining; i.e. Roman numeral-type information on the left and all the rest on the right. It helps organize those smoking-pencil lectures. We begin with sermon notes because I don't need to add anything to the daily lineup. We're all there, listening to the same material; it's easy to compare notes. We don't use Cornell for math lectures because of the nature of the material as Regentrude mentioned. However, we fold our paper by habit, and we've been known to throw a few Cornell notes into a math lecture.

 

 

We tried mind maps, which took a decided artistic and complicated direction with one of our children, making them completely ineffective, and they didn't make any sense to our linear-thinking, youngest son. I also teach outlining, which nobody has ever used except me. :glare:

Edited June 4, 2012 by 1Togo

[swimmermom3]

:confused: I did not mean to be snarky at all. Sorry if it came across like that.

 

It's that I really honestly do not know if Cornell notes work for humanities, because I never had to take any humanities classes at the university - that's why I limit my comments to STEM classes. I assume they must, because somebody came up with them, and math and physics is not where they work well.

 

 

No,no, no! I wasn't referring to you as being snarky while instructing your children about things such Cornell Notes; it is me that behaves badly when discussing much of the current methodology for teaching study skills.

 

Since my older two have been in public high school, they have come home with elaborate plans for how to take notes, how to read textbooks, how to organize one's materials, and how to prepare for tests. The overkill is amazing. They are required to have a certain number of annotations per chapter of literature, no matter what they are reading.

 

I think it is fine to teach the different methods for note taking as it gives the student a basis to start from. But the most effective method of note taking is the one the student makes his own. I may have taught my son how to take notes, but we do not take notes in the same manner. In fact, he chose to do something I had never been willing to try.

 

I don't mean to malign Cornell notes. It is an effective method for many people.

[1Togo]

Lisa,

 

Can you explain the literature annotations?

[Colleen in NS]

Thank you so much for this discussion -- I'm taking (mental) notes! ;)

 

Thank YOU for starting it - I'm learning a lot!

 

Since my older two have been in public high school, they have come home with elaborate plans for how to take notes, how to read textbooks, how to organize one's materials, and how to prepare for tests. The overkill is amazing. They are required to have a certain number of annotations per chapter of literature, no matter what they are reading.

 

I'm afraid to ask (because I like to keep things simple), but I am curious - what are some of these elaborate plans?

 

Lisa,

 

Can you explain the literature annotations?

 

:bigear: