Traditional Note-taking does not lead to understanding Related to the The Underline Buffer, our brains are unfortunately good at fooling ourselves into believing we understand something
Until you are able to:
- Put a text / lecture into your own words
- Be able to explain it after the fact
Then you have not truly understood.
School fools students into thinking they’re learning when often it’s wasted effort. By creating a Digital Garden, we are able to create notes in our own words and form connections between ideas, which is steps closer to proper understanding.
This habit is built through the expectation of examination. A good exam will require you to think about the material presented to you, and a bad exam asks pure memorization. Most exams are bad because they’re easy to write. Choose some facts that sound big and important from the chapter, choose something only said once in the lecture and not written at all anywhere else in the class, you have yourself an exam. This creates a hostile relationship with note-taking, furthering the want to write down anything that could be important. But, when anything could be important, how do you know what to write down?
The hostility has grown to a war with note-taking. So many adults I know don’t write anything down. Why? School is over, there are no more exams. Why should we write anything down anymore? This war needs a peace treaty. Notes cannot harm you. Imagine you’re a dragon hoarding your favorite things. You have a beautiful file that your kobolds are slowly organizing, and you receive a newspaper. The headline reads,
EXAMINATIONS ON YOUR FAVORITE THING IN ONE WEEKS TIME
This creates a hostile relationship what what you used to love
We have to re-train ourselves to understand what note-taking means as an adult. Which means falling in love with learning again