Most of us have memories of getting ready for
the new year at school with a bag full of freshly covered notebooks; separate
ones for classwork and homework, and a third set for tests. We took notes and
did our exercises in the classwork books while the homework set were sent home.
Gradually, as the year progressed, the thrill of handling new paper wore thin,
and attention turned, as it happens, to more interesting things that had little
to do with pen and paper. As we move into college, the number of notebooks
decreases considerably and many students bring no more than one that is used
for all subjects.
Last week, a new student asked me if he
needed to bring a particular kind of notebook to class. I was surprised by the
question, mainly because I don’t see too many people paying much attention to
writing paraphernalia — either pens or paper — apart from those who have a
fondness for fancy stationery.
Students do bring notebooks to class (mostly)
but I’ve also quite frequently seen some walk into class without one. I’ve also
increasingly seen students take notes on their digital devices — their phones,
tablets or laptops.
I’m not going into the relative advantages of
analog note-taking over digital (that has been the subject of a previous
column) — I think both have their place and their advantages.
What’s more important is how we organise our
notes so that they become useful and accessible. I’m a firm fan of bound
notebooks rather than loose leaves of paper, which more often than nor, get
lost or misplaced, or folded away in hard-to-find places. Unless, of course,
you are super-organised and file your papers methodically in clearly marked
folders!
Notebooks
But there are other questions one may ask.
For instance, does it make more sense to use one notebook across all subjects
or carry different ones for each subject, as we did in school? If we do not
exhaust a book in one term or year, should we continue to use it or open a new
one? Should we spend time rewriting our notes or use them just to jog our
memory while studying?
The answer to these questions, as to so many
others, is “it depends.”
In the interests of space and convenience, it
may be best to have one notebook that has sections for each subject. This
allows you to keep all your notes for a particular semester in one place, and
offers an easy way to organise your material.
A second notebook could be used for reference
notes drawn from library books and other sources, keeping pace with the topics
covered in class, so that the two together become a quick study guide. Keeping
the reference notes separate allows you to follow up and expand on class
discussions at your own pace, and at the level of detail you choose, without
interrupting the flow of the notes taken in class. These pages could also be
where you work further on the rough notes taken in class and refine your ideas.
While some of us don’t like the idea of
setting aside a book that still has blank pages, moving to a new book each
term/year does have its appeal. It gives you the sense of a new beginning, a
feeling that maybe this year, you won’t repeat the mistakes of the last one!
Discipline
It’s also important to develop a discipline
around how you keep your notes. I have often found myself looking at a page of
scrawled notes with no title or date and wondering where and when I wrote them.
These details may not add much to the content of the notes, but they do provide
context that can help you understand what you have written and how important
the information is for a particular purpose.
Following some simple conventions such as
marking the date of each entry and adding a clear label that describes the
topic of the class or discussion can help avoid future confusion. This is even
more applicable to digital notes, where titles or labels can act like keywords
usable in a search string.
If you’re taking notes on a digital device,
it is even more important to ensure that you organise them before you forget
when and why you took them. Put notes into clearly marked folders so that they
can be called up before exams or any other time you need them. Digital
information that is not clearly marked has a way of disappearing into the vast
black hole of our computer hard drives!
All this may seem like a lot of work, but
like any filing system, the time is well worth it. Many of us spend as much
time looking for lost papers and misplaced information — in both digital and
physical folders — as we do in gaining that information. Taking a little
trouble at the outset is definitely worth the time.
Source | The Hindu | 29 July 2015
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