How Taking Notes Can Save Your Life Once, on a cold winter morning, a professor walking into his website design education class and asked his students what they were doing there. They stared at him blankly. He stared back. “It’s nine o’clock on a Friday morning and it’s freezing outside. Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at home in bed with some hot chocolate or something?” The class laughed. Then he announced there would be a pop quiz. The students began to wonder why they came in that morning. The professor offered only one question: “Why are you here?” Everyone would get full participation points, and the student with the cleverest answer would get five extra points. The winning answer? Here it is: “If I didn’t come to class this morning, I would probably have missed some vital information for the text coming up, failed the test, failed the course, lost my scholarship, dropped out of school, ended up on the streets, and died a bitter death on an even colder, earlier winter morning.” Herein lays the answer to why going to class and taking good notes is important: it will save your life. Perhaps not literally, but it’s a nice sentiment. If you need note-taking tips, here are a few that should help you out.
Various Tips Use regular sized paper. Often professors tend to jump from idea to idea or circle back to add something pertinent to a point already passed. You may need side margins or extra space to draw in arrows or asterisks. Also, visually speaking, ideas will be clumped together, explained fully on one page. This should help you understand concepts as a whole, rather than flipping back and forth between multiple pages to learn one idea. Write as much as you can. Especially at the beginning of a semester, you never know what your teacher thinks is important or not. So write as much as you can down without falling behind. You have enough common sense to recognize the main points, but don’t underestimate tangents your professor goes off on. They could show up on your next quiz. Find your system. With the amounts of information you will have to keep track of, making a system of abbreviations, colors or symbols to help you keep track of information can be very helpful. Don’t waste time writing down long scientific words when you can
abbreviate. However! Make sure that you write down some sort of key to refer to. You may think that you will understand what you wrote later on, but chances are you won’t. Make sure that three weeks down the road you still understand your notes. Copy the board. If your teacher goes to the effort to write something on the board you want it. A modern trick to capture that information fast is to take a picture with your phone. Boom. So follow these guidelines, take good notes, and dominate your Web Design and Development Degree!
Photo Credit: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/, http://sis-giantempires-afroeurasia.wikispaces.com/