Why take notes?
I am a high school teacher, and I like to ask good questions that students have been doing for a long time. At the beginning of a new semester, one of the questions I ask is, “Why do you take notes?”
Here are some common responses I hear from them:
To remember so we do not forget it
To study them for exams
Because it's important
Students are not taught how to take notes
I don't think their responses are wrong. But no teacher has taught students about the principles of note-taking. Teachers are busy with their subject content. So people take note-taking for granted. It is like breathing. No one teaches us how to breathe because it is natural to breathe. So it is with note-taking. Teachers don't teach students to take notes. It's obvious that we should remember and be tested on the material.
Take notes to think
Here is a story about a famous physics professor, Richard Feynman.
He once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”
- Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes (p.82)
Richard Feynman didn’t take notes to remember or study for an exam; he took notes to think. The notes are a record of his thinking, not of information presented to him.
The goal of education is to help students become independent. To do this, they must become independent thinkers. So if students are busy writing down what the teacher is thinking, then we fall short of the goal. If we want better thinkers, then we need to teach them how to take notes.
So remember this:
Take notes to think rather than to remember what the teacher has said.
