I'm trying to learn. To become a better reader. A better studier. A better writer. This you already know. Ben gave us an article to read as homework for Sunday School this week. I read the article yesterday at the library. This morning I sat down to set to work on studying it, or outlining it at least. I ran into difficulty immediately.
There are skills I might have learned in high school. I had an excellent teacher my ninth grace year at Clear Lake High School Annex. She was structured and thorough and she taught us these things. But I never practiced. Never had any cause. I was smart; I had a good memory; my private school back home in Alabama was less well structured, and there was no need to practice or even try very hard. Which is ironic because I have always valued study, and I always claimed that my teachers were good, though looking back I have my doubts. They were good people. Some but not all of them were skilled practical teachers I suppose.
Yeah, like my friend Damon says, “Education: Epic Fail.”
Now I'm in my thirties and it matters. But I don't have the skills in place to do what I am wanting to. I have to learn and relearn those skills. I have resources available to me, but as Adler and Van Doren point out in a passage I reviewed this morning, study is a solitary activity.
Ben, my brother-in-law, is teaching a class this semester in Sunday School on how to read and teach the Bible. He has committed to giving us homework each week, and he depends on us to help him figure out what is an appropriate level of reading and homework to require. This weeks homework was an article from the New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition on basic hermeneutics by D.A. Carson.
I read the article yesterday at the library, knowing that I would probably have to do some outlining before feeling that I had mastered the content, or at least mastered it enough for the purposes of talking about it on Sunday. I had a little time left over after my other reading this morning so I set out to start outlining the article.
I got held up at the first sign of trouble, the trouble being that this would be my first actual experience with outlining, and I don't know what to do. The first paragraph of the article is an introduction. It quotes a bit of scripture that D.A. Carson thinks sets forth the difficulties associated with interpretation, the idea that it is possible to handle the scriptures incorrectly. He goes on to describe three different hermeneutical (Is that a word?) strategies or theories that have been used, arranged chronologically. The question I come up against immediately is: how do I arrange my outline. You might think this is a small matter to get hung up on, and you might be right. Nevertheless I am hung up.
This gets into some problems that I have with note-taking, the main problem being that I never came up with a useful system for note-taking. In fact, I never persisted in note-taking long enough in any single instance to develop a method for note-taking at all. In the past I found it boring, non-productive, and felt that if I were going to make notes this way, I might as well copy the entire book in full.
So what about you? What are your note-taking strategies? How did you develop them? What sort of advice would you give to someone who doesn't know what they are doing, but wants to learn?
5 comments:
Well, the best note-taking advice came from the most scatter-brained professor on the planet. It was in my graduate level renaissance music history class.
I was failing, and I went to her after class one day begging for help. I too had never developed any study habits.
Clue #1: The article has already been organized and structured for you.
Clue #2: Don't take notes on a separate piece of paper, it won't mean anything because you've placed the information in a vacuum, even God is one and three.
Write your notes in the margins of the article.
Clue #3: In each section of the article, in the margins re-write the most important sentence in your own damned words. Only pick one sentence per section and write it in close proximity to it's position within the article. This functions much the same way as the center column of a reference bible. It won't look pretty, this it it's a fashion show, it's about learning.
I am no expert note-taker by any stretch. Much of what you described in your school experience would apply to me, too. But, I would add an additional reason why I didn't take notes much in school: taking notes distracts me from engaging with the material. If I am taking notes during a lecture, then I am not listening to the lecture. If I am taking notes while reading, then I am not really reading. I am taking notes.
When I do take notes, I do so for the purpose of jogging my memory. I give my future self hints of what I was reading, where it may be retrieved, and why I thought it was significant. With books, articles, or deposition transcripts, I usually do this with post-it notes sticking out from the sides of the pages, like bookmarks. When I make notes on a pad of paper, rather than with post-its, I do not attempt to organize them.
If I need to give some sort of presentation or write a paper on the subject (why else would I be taking notes?), I'll need to bring some sort of order to the note chaos. But, that process is intertwined with the organization of the presentation/paper itself. Usually, I create an outline for the final product and check off the entries in my notes as I go. When I have accounted for all my notes by either finding a place in the outline for each entry, or by determining that certain notes aren't important enough or relevant enough to "make the cut" for the final product, then I'm done organizing both the paper/presentation and the notes. There is no distinct step in the process called "organize my notes."
In re-reading your post, it sounds like you may be wanting more than just note-taking tips. It sounds like you are wanting outlining tips, too. Those are distinct processes, at least the way I do it. I prepare outlines as part of the writing process. It helps me organize what I am trying to say.
I have heard of people who outline articles or books in order to understand them. I've never been good at that. It's always seemed like a colossal waste of time to me.
Outlining was stressed in law school as a study aid, and I did prepare a few outlines early on, despite my initial misgivings. The results of my experiment confirmed by belief. It was a lot of work without an equivalent amount of benefit.
But, you might be one of those people for whom outlining is helpful. And even if it doesn't help you with studying and understanding, knowing how to outline is pretty important for writing larger articles. So, here's something I found that looks like it might be instructive. I found it by asking Google "How to make an outline."
http://www.lavc.edu/library/outline.htm
As far as outlining, I don't outline; I mindmap instead. My "outlines" look like the root system or branches of a tree.
A plain outline doesn't represent what and how my mind is organizing, classifying or remembering the information.
You've seen the mindmaps on the Greenhorn Gardening Web site, but here is the guy who developed it.
Buzan had many of the same problems you had in school. You can do this with colored pencils. People may think it's funny looking, but my podcast listeners seems to like how I organize and present my thoughts.
http://www.thinkbuzan.com/us/
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