Comment by dns_snek
10 hours ago
Of course you learn more if you retype material than if you do nothing, but it's still a waste of time, comparatively speaking, because there are much better ways of engaging with the material like solving practice problems.
Having to spend 95% of the time taking notes of things that could be distributed in a PDF has only ever hindered me academically. It's mechanical and boring, my mind tunes out and I get nothing out of it.
Am I the only one who enjoys taking notes? But more in the sense of recording knowledge so that I have it in perpetuity.
For instance, I have almost completely forgotten how to solve ODEs, even though I had a good command of it when I learned it (by solving practice problems). In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.
Everyone likes nicely typeset LaTeX -- why not apply that craftsmanship to preserving academic notes?
>In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.
I don't really get it. If you've truly forgotten, you have to relearn it one way or another. What makes you think your past student self improvising a half-assed explanation in the moment could do better than a professional author who was already an expert when they wrote the book?