Having returned to a classroom setting at an older age than a typical college student, I am often overcome with a terrible nostalgia for the days before PowerPoint.
In the nineties, I was a teenager on the assembly line of public education system of South Korea. Korean education is very Spartan and has a tendency of squashing any budding creativity and free thinking in favor of rote memorization and formulaic thinking. While I felt like suffocating in this kind of education, it does succeed in ensuring a decent level of literacy and math skills of average citizens. (It depresses me just thinking about the sorry state of public education of America, where educators are so afraid of “boring” the students. What’s wrong with sitting them down and make them do a hundred problems of arithmetics? Such practice eventually leads to some insight of how numbers work naturally. Common Core math attempts to achieve this insight didactically, and it’s a good try. But it will lead to nowhere unless practice follows. And too many teachers who are not so bright with math to begin with are screwing it all up because they themselves are not getting the purpose of the standard.)
I apologize for the digression… Back to the nineties when I was hating my life in a typical Korean school, memorizing and memorizing. Back then, students took notes like there was no tomorrow. It wasn’t just students either. Teachers also wrote. There was a lot of writings on the blackboard. Some class sessions were deathly silent, except for the teacher’s chalk scratching against the board and the soft pencil sounds behind him, as fifty students or so in the class furiously copied everything into their notebooks.
Let’s now cross the Pacific ocean. Somewhere in USA several years later, I was jubilant that teachers didn’t fill the entire board with writings that I had to copy. Of course, there were variations depending on what subject was being taught, but most common method seemed to be writing out the topics or key points followed by verbal discussion. There was a pleasant amount of empty space on the board with maybe occasional illustrations here and there. It was then on the students to decide what and how much to write in their notes.
Of the many years that I spent in schools, the most enjoyable note-taking memory involves this particular teacher in a community college who taught various biology classes. He did not write a lot, but did extensive illustrations. It was a joy to replicate the process in my notebook, listen to his explanations, and annotate various parts of the drawing with key points of his explanations. When you review such notes at a later time, the whole lecture comes alive all over again.
Sadly, I would not feel this kind of joy again as the PowerPoint began domineering the classroom scenes. Why oh why did anyone think using a slide presentation tool was a great idea for teaching? It’s great for a sales pitch, or business reports. Not for teaching! Too many instructors get lazy and make slides with too many words and just read off of their slides. Why would I even bother coming to the class then? I’ll just download the PPT in the comfort of home, because I have learned how to read a long time ago.
In order to justify the use of digital slides, my belief is that they should not contain anything more than titles/headings, key words, and pictures. Even then, there is something very lacking about the instant nature of projecting a computer screen as opposed to hand-writing on the board. Maybe it’s just me, but my mind focuses better when I see the teacher in constant motion — writing or drawing on the board, turning back to face us, making gestures, more writing, etc — whereas my mind starts wandering off when the teacher is static in front of the computer and the projected images change with a click. Because the slide presentation is instant, writing notes becomes difficult as well. It no longer offers the time for writing since teachers can easily click through their slide deck. Who manually writes in today’s classrooms anyway? We don’t hear the scribbling of pencils anymore. It’s all, clack clack clack of typing fingers now.
In my current classes, 99.9% of lectures are done with PowerPoint, and I have adopted tying notes instead of writing as well. I dislike it though. I’m changing my habits out of necessity but I don’t have to like it. Here is the biggest issue: When I review, I have to look at the slides and then read my notes separately. Even if we have the PPT file in advance, it is not as simple to annotate images with your own notes as it would be on paper. Do I dare print out the whole lecture slides? I’d be lynched by tree lovers.
Apparently some students complain that there are too little explanation on the slides if an instructor attempts to make a more interactive lecture by creating a slide deck with mainly pictures. And so most lecture slides end up having quite a bit of text, which tends to force the instructor to read off the text, and the cycle of bad presentation continues…
The experience of re-reading my scribbles from the lecture, recalling the dynamics of the classroom as I re-write my notes… this delicious experience is all gone. This is the impression of present-day classroom from my point of view as an older-generation student.
So, what is the deal with my obsession with writing notes anyway? I often ask myself as well. As I mentioned, I find recalling lectures and retaining information much more effective by keeping hand-written notes. But honestly, I know that I don’t always write for the purpose of learning. There is an element of vanity, I suppose. I love seeing a notebook page getting filled with my own writings. I love running my fingers over the crinkled paper surface full of notes. I don’t particularly have a good hand-writing, so it’s not about aesthetics. It’s probably the feeling of having accomplished something that I get when I see those wonderfully filled pages:
jottermeow 