Taking Notes

I noticed while math mentoring, most students don’t take notes during class about the materials they are learning. Most teachers allow for notes on their test or a half sheet of paper, so having notes can be beneficial during tests to help students be successful. Also, having notes is proven to be very beneficial for memory of the content the students would intake.

Writing notes improves:

• Memory by actively engaging the brain: the act of writing, especially for topics like math, creates new neural pathways in the brain, making information easier to remember and retrieve later.
• Forcing you to process information: taking notes is not passive. It forces you to actively listen, process, and then write, creating a stronger connection to the material than just listening alone.
• Summarize information: reviewing your notes later acts as a form of retrieval practice. This process of retrieving the information and encoding it more thoroughly makes the content more “brain sticky”.
• Organize information instead of transcribing it verbatim: structuring your notes, for example, by separating topics, steps, examples, and questions, helps your brain organize and categorize the information as you write it down.

When writing down notes, you are not only visually seeing what to do but you’re physically encapsulating the information into your brain by writing it down for muscle memory. If you consistently create notes and practice on making your notes more organized, it would lead to a greater understanding and overall turnout for whatever you are doing; applicable to anything, even besides math. 

Personally, I wasn’t really fond of taking notes during class, because I felt like I didn’t need them if I already knew the material. However, when math started to get more advanced over time and we covered many topic areas, remembering all the work just by doing practice exercises wasn’t sufficient enough to do well. That’s when I started to realize that if I wrote down key concepts and questions that I knew would be hard and did them, I would succeed better than before. 

Typically, from what I’ve seen and experienced, many students that don’t take notes are underclassmen. Which is understandable because you might not be used to the habit of taking notes, but overtime you’ll come into the custom of taking notes for your sanity.

For my opinion, I feel as if you are able to strengthen your way of taking notes at a young age, you’ll definitely succeed farther than what you expect and it will allow the processing of the new information that you attain to come easier to you, since you’re the one that’s taking the notes. Your notes are only known to you, meaning you can write things down in certain ways that help you understand the information being presented to you, making it more flexible and easier to comprehend. 

There are different ways of taking notes to best help you prepare or review for anything. You can have your notes organized in different formats, whether that is with topic subheadings and then pasting information underneath or color coding certain sections to help see information or to have it as a reminder of what areas you need to focus on more. When taking notes during class, you are more active in listening and engaging into the conversation typically because you are attuned with the new information and will ask questions since you’re not passively listening.