A Note on Notes

Last year I found that I would fill up all of these notebooks with countless notes and ridiculous amounts of doodles. Unfortunately I would usually remember the doodles that I drew and not so much the content beside them. This year I have converted to taking notes primarily in word documents. Originally I had avoided this method of taking notes simply because I thought that I would be disconnected from the classroom. However, I am finding many different benefits to this method of note taking.

The reason why I started doing this is that my backpack was getting too heavy with all of the different notebooks that I was hauling everywhere. So I bought two notebooks to test my computer notes against- to see if the benefit of a light backpack is out-weighed by my hypothesized lack of connection to the class. So far I have found that I am not only toting around a lighter backpack but I am also able to write notes down just as fast on my computer as I can on paper (plus I can reformat the information once I have written down a large section of notes). I have also found it much easier to find my notes for every class and also keep track of the homework that I have every night by just checking my computer documents. At the same time I have found that the computer is my eye contact default making me miss more of the classroom discussion than I would like for the most part. I am able to keep up with the content covered but I would have to say that I wish that there was some way to be able to be just as involved in these discussions as I am with pen and paper. Maybe this will come with practice but for the time being I am rather satisfied for the trade off that I am making.

In our lives we often fall into these slumps of complacency. We continue on with the same methods that we have always used because they work well enough. I have been taking notes in the exact same way for as long as I can remember but there are other things that I do that I don't change. For example, every day when I get home from school I always eat a snack. This is a habit that I have established since grade school. Am I always hungry when I come home? No. Do I eat a snack because that is just what I am used to doing? Yeah, I think so. The same thing can happen to our teaching. I am usually pretty decent at public speaking and I am comfortable in doing so. However, I need to be aware that not all students learn best by being talked at. Actually, I would plead the case that this is very far from the illusive "perfect model of teaching". The problem that I have is that this is where my comfort zone is and where I have developed my skill set. Due to a factor other than comfort- that is, my beliefs of an effective classroom- I feel as though I will need to change my default style of teaching. My best solution for this is to try a different method. It is true that it may have its foreseeable downsides but unless one explores the new, one will continue to be static, solidifying one's place in the methods that they have already deemed flawed.

Lesson for the week: Always be open to modifying your methods in search of what works best. It may be true that we cannot attain perfection but by investigating different methods we can get a lot closer than we once were. Note: this applies for much more than simple note taking.