Good Note-taking Habits...

I put a lot of stress on taking good notes. However, a lot of times, some professors can make that difficult.

How so? They use Power Point.

What's so awful about Power Point? It can make the presenter lazy. A lot of people just put all of their information, and I do mean all, into slides and read it aloud. Before I go further, let me tell a story from undergrad.

I took art history as an elective. I was excited for it. I love art. I love history. It's the perfect match.

Then I had my first day of class.

Class was set up in a very specific way.
1. Quiz on assigned readings
2. Lecture

What's so bad about that? The lecture was the professor reading from the book and showing us pictures from the book. Also, attendance was something like 20% of your grade and the professor's best use of her TAs was to set them near the door and get the names of any student
leaving and mark them as absent.

One other thing, the professor spoke like a female Ben Stein.

Every day I fell asleep in class.

One day I thought I'd outsmart her and bring a Gameboy to play in class. I didn't think to bring headphones though. As riveting as Tetris was, it didn't fully block out her voice.

I fell asleep. What's more, my head rolled back on the theater-style seat and I started to snore.
I startled awake to a rumbling bass.

I had snored loud enough to wake myself up.

I was really embarrassed. I leaned over to the girl sitting next to me to apologize but she was still asleep.

The moral of this story is that innefectual lecturing is inescapable.

However, there is a lot you can do with this.

First, do your best to listen for contexts of what might be important. If you've got your Power Point slides in front of you, this shouldn't be too hard.

Next, copy your notes after class. A lot of people have thanked me for putting my notes on-line and I'm very glad to help, but I have an ulterior motive for doing so. Re-typing my notes forces me to look at them again and reconsider them. I'm not an auditory learner or a reading learner, (I forgot the technical term for that.) However, when I go over them again, I try
to imagine what is actually happening is the body and I get it.

Also, if you're one of my regular professors, this isn't targeted specifically at you. We did just have a guest lecturer though that fell into this in a hard way.