Lecture Notes

Well, this seems to be another one of those posts that really don’t have anything to do with Finland. Was struggling with “what do I write of next” -problem and asked Dī for a topic. So, “Lecture notes” it is. I try not make a habit out of these. Really.

I haven’t been on a real lecture in a while.

The last one was in Riga, in Latvian, about (amongst other things) theories regarding the year 2012. The language barrier was really bad, as my Latvian vocabulary is limited to say the least. I just couldn’t understand what was being said. So I was there watching the pretty pictures and trying to form some sort of a whole from what I saw, the scraps of Latvian I knew and the few borrowed words that kept coming up. Interesting to say the least.

Ah. Come to think of it, technically that wasn’t the last lecture I’ve been on. I was to that damn conference in Berlin the other week. But when you go and listen to a lecture held by someone you’ve been partying with the night before, it isn’t a real lecture. It just doesn’t count.

But lecture notes. Lecture notes. Lecture notes.

I’m not really the one you should come to about this subject. My history with them is more a series of tragedies than valuable advice.

I remember some years ago back at the University of Technology when I got officially introduced to some fellow student for the first time and they reply to my introduction with “Ah, yes! You! I actually remember you! You were the guy who was always drawing all those awesome pictures during the programming lectures three years ago. I sat behind you a couple of times and stared in awe. Do you still do that?”

I admit, I probably don’t have any written material left from Programming 101. But I do think that my artistic skills improved a lot. Learned a lot about shading and highlights.

But the programming courses weren’t something where taking the notes was really important anyways. You’d learn by doing the practical stuff and reading the tutorials when you did.

Things changed when I switched majors.

Did a complete 180 degree turn with that, from scientist to scholar. From engineering to cultural studies. And the switch from practice to theory became very apparent in how much got written down during the lectures. My notes from American History 101 fill a notebook from cover to cover. Which would be neat and all, but around this time I was really into mind-maps.

The end result is page after page of connections between terms, ideas, people, places, years and everything else.

When the time for the exams came, I looked back at the notebook and I have to admit that it looked like something out of a conspiracy theorist’s closet – wild lines connecting everything to everything else, with small notes sometimes explaining why they’re related. Plus seemingly unrelated notes in the margins.

The closest to actual information you could get out from them was something akin to “The Boy Scouts are influencing Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Southern Baptist Church via Mind-Control Satellites and Chloride in the tap water. THE CAPITAL IS IN FLOROS!”

I still managed to ace the exams, since, as a former Boy Scout, I did know the facts, even if my notes made it look like crazy-talk. But I did learn my lesson and eased with the mind-maps and tried to focus on actual information.

After that debacle, I switched to computers for my lecture note needs. A Mac laptop worked quite well at first, but its battery life started to go down. In the end, to save the battery I had to turn off the display and write my lecture notes blind, relying on muscle memory for the correct letters and sheer luck for the rest. The amount of typos was staggering, and again, come exam time, the notes were a bit hard to follow.

The era of using a computer for lecture notes really came to an end when they started upgrading the campus wireless network. Do you know how much more interesting it is to check on Facebook if someone’s cat has a new toy than write down the list of five most influential robber barons of all times. I do. So to keep myself interested in lectures, I left the computer home and went back to writing notes the old fashioned way.

And speaking of old-fashioned. During a more pretentious phase of my life I tried another tool for writing down my notes. When I say pretentious, I mean the time when I had a leather briefcase with me to the university and wore ties to lectures. Well, I still wear ties, but you get the point. Back then I tried using fountain pens for note-writing. And I tell you this, you do get rocking-looking notes with them and tend to focus on the relevant, as you want the notes to be as awesome as possible.

The thing with fountain pens is that once you screw something up, things escalate from bad to worse quite quickly. To summarize, ink stains can be really hard to get rid of. And there are situations where it becomes cheaper to buy a new shirt than try to clean an old one.

But being a worker drone these days, lecture notes and all that are a thing of the past for me. I must admit that I’ve really started appreciate the feel of a pen and some paper through work. Compared to word processors and well-thought-out emails, I find that I’m more creative when given a corner of a napkin, a pen and a face-to-face brainstorming session. Writing the basic ideas up in physical space as they come along really helps the brain focus on them.

And I guess that is the thing with writing lecture notes. No matter if it was blind-writing on a computer or making raving mad mind-maps on a notebook. When I’m focused on getting information from something and at the same time explain it to myself in some different way (like mind-maps), I form a more firm mental connection about it. Makes recollection so much easier later on.

PS. If you happen to have the list of the five most influential robber barons of all times, mind sending that to me? For some reason I don’t have it…