When I was in college, I was not a good note-taker. My notes were by no means thorough, nor did I make good use of them, so I am probably not a credible authority on the matter. I am still not much of a taker of lecture notes. But I think I have learned a thing or two about reading notes; I do not do them like I used to, nor do I teach them like I used to.
I would once have thought of “reading notes” as the notes that we used to take on index cards to write research papers. I dutifully followed this method, although it never really worked very well for me. It somehow always seemed clumsy, artificial, and more trouble than it was worth. I soldiered on with it because it was the required method, and we were graded on how well we seemed to be using it, and besides, I couldn’t have suggested a better way. I cut corners where I could, and the sky didn’t fall.
Likewise, I taught the same method, with mixed results. It all sounds perfectly, inescapably logical, but I always felt that most students went through the motions because I checked their notes, and it was part of the project grade. This served one purpose for me: it gave me some idea of the provenance of the material. But did the kids actually use them to good effect? I had little confidence.
The change began in the summer of 1990. I was accepted into a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar Machiavelli’s The Prince. We spent our mornings in the classroom, chewing over that book, page by page and paragraph by paragraph. We had to write a paper. We were supposed to be doing parallel reading on Machiavelli’s period in general and commentary on The Prince in particular. We were supposed to write up what we had read and make copies for all around the table.
Once I decided on a topic for my essay, my reading naturally became more selective and focused. It soon occurred to me that I was not “taking notes,” but actually pre-writing parts of my paper. Naturally, I saved everything to disk. When something from my colleagues’ reading notes and presentation notes seemed relevant, I wrote that up too. When the time came to actually write the paper (the night before it was due, naturally) it went together quickly. Big chunks were pre-written and merely needed to be woven in. It was a revelation.
I wish that I could include those notes now, but I seem to have parted company with the disk. I even translated them from CPM WordStar to Windows Word, but I can’t find those disks either. Ah, well.
The important thing is that it changed the way I taught research writing. Students make one of two major strategic errors in their “note taking.” Some laboriously copy out whole passages, word for word. Not only is this a great waste of time, it is dangerous. How? When the time comes to write the paper, there is the same problem as when working straight from the source: when you have the source right in front of you, it is almost impossible to avoid some degree of plagiarism, Those words go from the page, through your eyeballs and out your fingers, unprocessed. The language of the source comes creeping into your language, unbidden. These are not proper notes. Likewise, a print-out with parts highlighted is not notes; it is merely a source with portions highlighted. The danger is the same. At the other extreme are the “notes” so abbreviated and cryptic that the note-taker himself can make neither head nor tail of them later. But if you read a “headful,” be it a paragraph, a page, or a few pages, turn the book over or close the window, and write it up without looking at it. It will be fresh in your mind, but you would be hard put to reproduce the exact language. Then, check for accuracy. Furthermore, if you write it up at the time, you will find that you actually have a lot of your paper pre-written. The computer makes your notes infinitely organizable, which, after all, is the rationale behind note cards. Just copy from one document to the other, or if you are low tech, use scissors and paste.
I tell my students this story and assure them that it is easier. Trust me! I’m basically lazy. (I must stop using present tense.) In later years, I was much more flexible about the format of their notes. It didn’t have to be cards. But they had to convince me that what they had was notes, and that they were usable.
I taught Heart of Darkness for many years. I never tire of that little novel. I would re-read it, every word, ever year. As I read, things would stand out, things would click, things would connect with things in other passages. As I noticed such motifs, I would make a note on a Post-It and insert it. I would list the pages for all the cross-references I could find. After a few years, my desk copy was so full of yellow notes that it was virtually unusable. At this point, I decided to type up everything I had found. It ended up running several pages; I called it the “Compendious Concordance of Key Quotations from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” I have not made much direct instructional use of it in class, but I found it beneficial as a valuable aid to close reading.
A year or few ago, I did a similar thing with Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It is a favorite contemporary novel, and I have read it several times. My decision to read it yet once more, this time keeping reading notes was because I was going to lead a book-club discussion. This time, when I typed it up, I grouped the quotations by motif instead of just cross-referencing them. I don’t think they were of much use in reading the discussion, but again, they were a great aid to my close reading of this intricately wrought novel.
Over the past year, I have read some interesting books on education that are relevant to the onslaught of Reformism. The problem is that although I refer to them in posts, I have been poor at passing along much information about their actual contents, at least in any detail. Once I have finished the book, I can only write a conventional review, and I have not been able to work up much interest in doing so.
This brings us to the present point. I am now reading Pasi Stahlberg’s Finnish Lessons. I find this book of particular interest because the Reformists are fond of pointing out how badly American schools suffer in comparison to Finnish schools. This insignificant little nation of lumberjacks and reindeer herders (or such is the popular perception if not the reality) consistently whups our sorry asses on standardized tests. But what do Finnish schools do that makes them so superior?
In The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond makes some interesting suggestions that do not square with the picture the Reformists paint, but she does not go into much detail. Stahlberg gives us meaningful detail greatly at odds with the “Reforms” being foisted on public education today. I am several chapters in, but I think I would like to back up to the beginning and share the “good parts,” the choice tidbits, as I go – reading notes, as it were.