Very true! Kids of all ages should be taught that the best way to prepare for an exam is to go over their class notes, but not just reading them, writing them down and putting notes over the initial notes. I can see how for a doctor, while taking notes, neurons are sparking, and a diagnosis or suspicion of a diagnosis is formed. This whole thinking process can't be verbalized to the patient, so no scribe or AI tool can capture these thoughts. Thus, as you say, these thoughts would be lost without the notes. And, as you say, some may not have even existed in the first place without the act of taking notes. Hmm!
We are a small but passionate tribe, us lifelong note takers. If it hasn’t crossed your radar you might be interested in what’s known as a “personal knowledge base” - an ongoing collection of notes combining the best things you’ve ever thought of alongside juicy quotes, learnings, really whatever you find worth remembering. Thanks for writing this! Here’s more on the PKB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base
I have been taking notes almost my whole life. I’m at NYU now getting my second masters, this time in education. Not only have I printed all of the readings from the web, I take a lot of notes as I read. I also take pages and pages of notes every class. I can’t learn any other way. I am a visual learner and the act of writing things down, and rereading them, definitely cements them in my brain. I have filled over 100 legal pads in my adult life along with many journals. During my first masters degree, Allen Ginsberg was my poetry mentor (during my MFA) and he was writing all of the time, so was I.
I love this column. For more than 40 years as a daily newspaper cultural critic, a notebook and pen accompanied me to every show, concert, performance — even if I wasn’t going to write about it. It’s been a few years since my daily regimen changed, but the act of note-taking hasn’t. My shelves are lined with those notebooks (Moleskine small, ruled; black cover) filled with unintelligible scrawls; it was the act of jotting down that planted something in my mind for later reference. As you say: >>>the act of taking notes is an inextricable part of the act of thinking, to the point where thoughts that I have not written down feel like they almost don’t exist.<<< There’s also something fundamentally Jewish about note-taking, and this occurred to me during Yom Kippur services this fraught and painful season. So much of what constitutes faith for a Jew lies in the abstract, in vesting our hopes and fears and dreams in words, the abstraction that displaced the physical — idol worship — with the unknowable as expressed in the Sh’ma — that ultimate written, mysterious note.
Very true! Kids of all ages should be taught that the best way to prepare for an exam is to go over their class notes, but not just reading them, writing them down and putting notes over the initial notes. I can see how for a doctor, while taking notes, neurons are sparking, and a diagnosis or suspicion of a diagnosis is formed. This whole thinking process can't be verbalized to the patient, so no scribe or AI tool can capture these thoughts. Thus, as you say, these thoughts would be lost without the notes. And, as you say, some may not have even existed in the first place without the act of taking notes. Hmm!
We are a small but passionate tribe, us lifelong note takers. If it hasn’t crossed your radar you might be interested in what’s known as a “personal knowledge base” - an ongoing collection of notes combining the best things you’ve ever thought of alongside juicy quotes, learnings, really whatever you find worth remembering. Thanks for writing this! Here’s more on the PKB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base
Bertie,
Thank you for this.
I have been taking notes almost my whole life. I’m at NYU now getting my second masters, this time in education. Not only have I printed all of the readings from the web, I take a lot of notes as I read. I also take pages and pages of notes every class. I can’t learn any other way. I am a visual learner and the act of writing things down, and rereading them, definitely cements them in my brain. I have filled over 100 legal pads in my adult life along with many journals. During my first masters degree, Allen Ginsberg was my poetry mentor (during my MFA) and he was writing all of the time, so was I.
I love this column. For more than 40 years as a daily newspaper cultural critic, a notebook and pen accompanied me to every show, concert, performance — even if I wasn’t going to write about it. It’s been a few years since my daily regimen changed, but the act of note-taking hasn’t. My shelves are lined with those notebooks (Moleskine small, ruled; black cover) filled with unintelligible scrawls; it was the act of jotting down that planted something in my mind for later reference. As you say: >>>the act of taking notes is an inextricable part of the act of thinking, to the point where thoughts that I have not written down feel like they almost don’t exist.<<< There’s also something fundamentally Jewish about note-taking, and this occurred to me during Yom Kippur services this fraught and painful season. So much of what constitutes faith for a Jew lies in the abstract, in vesting our hopes and fears and dreams in words, the abstraction that displaced the physical — idol worship — with the unknowable as expressed in the Sh’ma — that ultimate written, mysterious note.
I had the same thought!