The bottom line to all these statements is just two phrases – “Getting it...”

Taking Notes ✍

[vis-à-vis Voice Recordings & Screen Shots]

By

Dr. Maria Preethi Srinivasan

Head, Department of English

Queen Mary’s College (Autonomous)

Chennai, TN

The rat race has its own avatar in the academic world.

Anxiety to acquire knowledge characterizes certain types of behaviour.

“Sir, May I have your ppt?”

“Sir, Your lecture was great. I recorded it!”

“I took screenshots of all the ppt slides!”

“I took a photocopy of the whole book!”

All these sound like familiar statements. Don’t they?

The bottom line to all these statements is just two phrases –

“Getting it”.

When the photocopier arrived, the act of photocopying an academic article, gave you a sense of fulfillment/completion, because you “got the material”.

When the android phone arrived, you could “get it” by recording/taking screenshots as the person was lecturing.

It might be offensive to label the act of “getting it” as aggressive behaviour.

But, pause for a moment to LISTEN.

Yes, we stopped “listening” long ago: listening and making notes: and while we listened, jotting down our own ideas in boxes in the lecture notes.

Making notes from a book one was reading was a skill that one acquired.

As a novice you felt like copying the entire book from the first word to the last: everything was well-written, thought-provoking and new.

But you matured as a reader and shelved anxiety.

You read and re-read and got the gist of what the writer was saying and gave up your amateurish desire to copy lines.

You zeroed in on the noteworthy/quote worthy parts of the text you were reading.

Then came a time when you realized that you grew because you made notes of what you were reading/listening to and somewhere along the way you attributed that growth to “listening”, “reading” and “writing” being cognitive processes.

So, it’s time to get back to first principles, though the devil may allure us with his “devices” (I mean gadgets like the android phone).