By Amy Van Veen (Staff Writer) – Email
Professors, in numbers too high to name, speak so quickly these days; as a result, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with hand-written notes. Our hands would likely combust due to overuse. It could happen! As a result, laptops are a preferred means of note taking for students today, especially those who can brag about their words-per-minute. But due to controversy over laptops in class, our right to type our notes could be in jeopardy; some profs have even gone so far as to ban personal computers in class, which is detrimental to a modern learning environment.
When students opt for hand-written notes, short-hand is quickly invented for greater efficiency during class, but when looking back on those same notes, they sometimes seem to be written in an entirely different language. Hand writing quickly becomes illegible and the chicken scratches on page after page of Staples notebooks taken from innocent trees are just as easily discarded at the end of semester as the stack of parking passes piling up on the dashboard.
For exam prep, these ink covered notebooks are only useful if they are accompanied by a keen memory of each and every class and lecture. Most often, I have found, when hand-written notes are taken, the only things students write down are the notes the prof takes the time to write up on the board; from experience, those notes are limited to a phrase or two that is deemed worthy for all to see, but have little credibility as stand-alone notes. For the profs who do use Powerpoint slideshows, students spend most of the class vigorously reading and writing rather than listening to what the professor is saying between the notes. Those in-between comments, for some tricky educators, often end up being the testable material because they are typically the first things to get tuned out by the students.
As a result, laptops are the preferred mode of note-taking for those who want to catch everything the professor utters in order to get a more comprehensive series of notes throughout the semester. Thanks to all of those typing programs that became mandatory while in elementary school, students of our generation are able to jot down notes written on the board, notes presented from the projector, and notes spoken and discussed between all the rest.
Not only does having a laptop in class allow for more extensive note-taking, it also gives students the opportunity to look things up in class that may be relevant, search for terms or theories that may be unknown, or follow along with online posted notes and articles from the professor.
Those who take full positive advantage of the opportunity to plug in and vigorously take notes should not be penalized for their peers’ lack of focus and weak attention span that quickly leads their eyes to something shiny over something credible. If the lesser minds want to check yet again for their friends’ updates or tweet about who knows what, they are the only ones suffering when it comes to exam time.
