back to article Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

Welcome once again to Who, Me?, in which The Register celebrates the working week stretching out ahead of us all with readers' tales of messes they made, and escaped. This week, meet "Ernie", who several years ago found himself in a training course during which large cathode ray tube monitors were used to display notes. Ernie …

  1. KittenHuffer Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Notes? How old school!

    How long ago was this course?!?

    Any time in the last 15 years I'd have pulled the camera from my pocket and been taking snaps of the display.

    -------> Cos they're always taking photos!

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Notes? How old school!

      > Cos they're always taking photos!

      You mean monitoring communications?

    2. chivo243 Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Notes? How old school!

      school in the past 15 years? How old are you?

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        Shrug. I was in my forties when I received my most recent degree, and there may be more yet. It's really only a question of whether I want to spend the money.

    3. WanderingHaggis

      Re: Notes? How old school!

      Large CRT monitor might be a clue about how old the story is. But taking lecture notes are not necessarily a bad thing -- it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing.

        yeah thats one tiny upside compared to the massive downside of :

        "You fail to take in the information and process it because 80% of your time is spent frantically copying notes down"

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          Exactly that. After a lecture you end up with sheets of unreadable notes and no clue as to what they were meant to say.

          A good lecture provides useful information that you can add to what you already know, with notes that give you an aide memoir for significant details. If you're copying down a text book you're just wasting valuable learning time.

          1. Dave314159ggggdffsdds Silver badge

            Re: Notes? How old school!

            The basic reason lectures exist is precisely so students can be given the information in textbooks they could not otherwise access. It dates back to the hand-copying era. Perhaps it's a little outdated?

          2. swm

            Re: Notes? How old school!

            When I taught computer science I always handed out a copy of the slides I would be using. The students could then add to the notes or use them later. I had 2 styles for my notes: one with large print for the lecture and another, double column, with smaller print for the handouts.

            I almost never read from the slides or notes but talked about the topics mentioned in the slides. I assumed that the students could read and were looking for illumination.

            A really bad lecturer would hide part of the slide until he came to that part of the slide resulting in the last line of the slide being visible for only seconds.

            The purpose of teaching is to impart information - not controlling the class.

            1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

              Re: Notes? How old school!

              Sometimes hiding and then revealing a part of the slide can be useful, for example when posing a problem and providing a solution. Obscuring the answer makes the students think, and revealing it later means that the answer is n the same slide as the question for later review.

              I had a stage in my career where I ended up delivering technical training (I guess this may have been because I admitted to my employer that I had taught at a UK Polytechnic for a year), and with most of the presentation packages going back to Freelance (which I much preferred to PowerPoint), you can produce the slides, and then attach additional information as lecturer notes.

              I often filled in the lecturer notes as an aide memoir for myself, so that I remembered all the things I wanted to talk around the actual slides. I feel this made my lecturers more interesting, as I was not just reading the slides, I was engaging with the audience to judge how they were following.

              When I gave out handouts, I also included my lecturer notes in the pack. My feedback was normally very good (my manager attended one mandatory training session I presented, and came out to find me saying that he was intending to doze through it, but was actually found it both interesting and informative).

            2. heyrick Silver badge

              Re: Notes? How old school!

              "A really bad lecturer would hide part of the slide until he came to that part of the slide resulting in the last line of the slide being visible for only seconds."

              One of my teachers had a contraption that was a roll of plastic that he used to just wind from one side to the other, like an endless slide. So not only did you have to try to copy it at the rate it was going, but from one moment to the next the thing moved.

              To the above poster who said one needs only copy the important things - not so useful when you're told it will all be "on the test" with no other indication of which parts are the important parts (hindsight years later - none of it!).

              Some teachers were good and gave handouts with the material and talked about it, using the OHP as a guide. Other teachers were sadistic bastards that had said the same thing over and over for a lifetime and hated the material, hated themselves, hated us, and made damn certain we all knew it.

        2. Evil Auditor Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          And this is why you should attend prepared, i.e. already having a good understanding of what is being lectured. (That, of course, depends on knowing beforehand what topic will be covered...)

          1. Mark 85

            Re: Notes? How old school!

            And this is why you should attend prepared, i.e. already having a good understanding of what is being lectured. (That, of course, depends on knowing beforehand what topic will be covered...)

            If you already understand then why go to the lecture?

            1. Evil Auditor Silver badge

              Re: Notes? How old school!

              You arrive with a clear idea of what you do and do not understand -to clarify those questions- and are prepared to deepen your knowledge.

              (At least for me, I don't need someone lecturing me on what I can just as well read in a textbook.)

              1. heyrick Silver badge

                Re: Notes? How old school!

                Schools don't tend to teach how to learn. They teach you to sit there while copying stuff off the overhead projector images (I predate the use of computers) and attempt not to be completely bored out of your mind and, therefore, retain very little of what was being said and shown, especially when the teacher rattles through the material and you can only keep up if you're capable of writing at a talking speed. My friend and I had an agreement, he'd start writing from the top and I'd start halfway down. We still missed chunks.

                I love reading. My mother subscribed to a series called The Joy Of Knowledge. That was my main educator, not many hundreds of wasted hours in a classroom.

                1. LybsterRoy Silver badge

                  Re: Notes? How old school!

                  I predate OHPs but I was lucky - we were taught to think and question things. Bit different to today.

                  1. Ben 56

                    Re: Notes? How old school!

                    Kids have learnt not to question.

                    I was pre camera phone too, but I questioned my university lecturers/professors of many years experience and book writing when I knew they had stuff wrong (e.g. waterfall modelling problematic compared to the upcoming agile, programming mistakes, and missing use of UML diagrams in designs). Ultimately I ended up with lower marks for the pain of it.

                    I learnt only after my degree not to question their ego, because that's what it was doing, shame I didn't learn earlier like these kids I might have had better grades (my career went on to be Lead Dev for some massive companies and I'm now on executive level pay doing dev work, so clearly I did something right by no longer questioning).

                    The short is; don't question, ignore their mistakes and do it your way anyway. They learn from seeing your doing.

                2. uccsoundman

                  Re: Notes? How old school!

                  I eventually took a Shorthand class so I could take notes at talking speed. Not 100% effective (I wasn't that good at it) but better than writing longhand.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: If you already understand then why go to the lecture?

              Easy* A?

              * except when you just think you know it then you're in big trouble.

        3. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          "You fail to take in the information and process it because 80% of your time is spent frantically copying notes down"

          Back in the olden days, when students were students and lecturers were old men in scratchy suits...

          I used to take rough notes to cover the main points of a lecture, and then go and write them up later. That way, you have an aide-mémoire after the lecture, and the act of recalling and writing neatly helps cement the details, and also gives you a legible record later when you come to revise for exams. I had text books at uni which I don't think I ever actually opened, because paying attention in lectures and tutorials was kind of the point of attending university, rather than just reading the books.

          1. MachDiamond Silver badge

            Re: Notes? How old school!

            "I had text books at uni which I don't think I ever actually opened, because paying attention in lectures and tutorials was kind of the point of attending university, rather than just reading the books."

            Doing that will depend on how the teacher constructs their exams. Sometimes they'll give you a clue in the syllabus by assigning reading or informing students about the chapters a given lecture will cover. They might have test questions from the book that they don't cover in their lectures. They'll just ask for questions about the reading so if you aren't clear on something, they try to add to it. I had one teacher that almost never posed questions from the lectures and never seemed to talk about the information in the book. I could have skived off and only showed up for exams, but I didn't want to miss something. I seem to recall that I'd do other work during that lecture sometimes and just keep enough awareness active to catch anything important like an exam date changing.

        4. Dabooka

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          It's a balance, any decent trainer knows there's little on slides to take notes on.

          They should act as a prompt for all concerns and any notes formed by the audience member's observations. That's how the act helps recall.

          However in practice we've all been in sessions that are death by Power Point

        5. TRT Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          Well you know what they say... how does a lecturer know what kind of audience they have? Well when they start the class and say "Good morning everyone!", if they're teaching an undergraduate degree class, the students reply "Good Morning", if they're teaching an HND class, the students just ignore them and sit waiting for the lesson to begin, and if they're teaching ND the students write it down.

        6. LybsterRoy Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          Or you make notes of the bits that may actually be useful rather than gathering crut to be ignored till the end of time.

        7. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          Yawn. Any of you experts care to cite what pedagogical research you're basing your claims about note-taking on?

      2. John Robson Silver badge

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        My astro lecturer gave us a complete set of notes at the start of the course... with a handful of deliberate mistakes and a selection of blanks.

        Enough to keep you in the lectures listening, but also enough that your attention was on what was being said rather than on writing.

      3. DoctorPaul

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        Quote from my uni days in the 70s.

        "The lecture is a method of transferring ideas from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student, without passing through the mind of either."

      4. jh27

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        > But taking lecture notes are not necessarily a bad thing -- it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing.

        Speak for yourself. Personally, I have always found that I can learn very well by listening and understanding what is being said. When I am forced to take down notes, from a screen, I am no longer able to process what is being said so I learn precisely nothing and I'm lucky if copy down a quarter of what is shown on the screen in the given time (I write very slowly).

        1. CrackedNoggin Bronze badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          In the fifth form I had an economics teacher who wrote at in chalk while talking at breakneck speed, and before long erasing it for the next "page". There was no textbook. The beautiful cursive I had learned up to that point was far too slow, and I quickly developed a scrawl illegible even to myself. A complete waste of time and adrenaline. All I can remember is two words: "limited corporation".

      5. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        "But taking lecture notes are not necessarily a bad thing -- it helps you to remember by including an other sense/activity writing."

        Not always. I was lucky to have a very good teacher early on that had us doing exercises to find out for ourselves how we learn. I found it does help me to write things down, but I can be rather slow at it. I always did very well at my Uni classes if I could get a recording (audio) and make notes from that, starting and stopping the tape when there was a key point. It let me listen to the lecture without losing the thread and doodle any diagrams/equations the teacher made on the blackboard. Repetition also works well so I'd play the tapes in my car over and over. If I would really want to learn something, I needed to take the theory out of the class and do something real with it.

    4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: Notes? How old school!

      Big color CRTs cost a fortune, if for nothing other than their mounting hardware. There were no practical means of photographing them during that era. Remember that CRTs flicker and there were no portable stabilized lenses. You'd need a film camera with a telephoto lens, manual controls, and a mini tripod. It would be heavy, expensive to buy, not cheap to use, and loud. Film development was usually next day.

      I had worse. One instructor gave weekly assignments by ISBN and chapter range. There must have been a hundred students and a hundred librarians contemplating his murder. Librarians had to use microfiche catalogs and telephone calls to find books. They'd get a call looking for a book while on hold for their call looking for the same book. With 100 students calling at the same time, there was no way of knowing when the search looped.

      1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

        Re: Notes? How old school!

        That reminded me of the time I recently tried to phone-camera-photograph an electronic notice board at a railway station. It was impossible (in context). The text seems to be made of pixels which apparently are flicking on and off randomly, so you get half of them. Recording the show on video didn't work, either.

        1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

          Re: Notes? How old school!

          Use a longer exposure time. All of todays phone-cameras allow setting it. Somewhere around 20 ms or 1/50th second should work most of the time.

  2. Korev Silver badge

    > The instructor understood what had happened, and the atmosphere in the room was rather frosty for the remainder of the day.

    Did they try to screen out who did it?

    1. Wally Dug
      Coat

      Probably not - Ernie's already said that they weren't too bright...

      1. Korev Silver badge
        Coat

        A bit dim you might say...

        1. l8gravely

          What a contrast from the previous week...

          1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
            Coat

            Brilliant!

            1. apa 64

              Or as Paula might say,

              Brillant!

            2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

              They're monitoring the situation.

            3. Montreal Sean

              In this case not so brilliant!

    2. Happy_Jack

      No, it's BS, like most El Reg fairy tales.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Really? Because one person turning down a brightness knob when everyone else was gone is too implausible? Maybe I'd be inclined to believe you if the recovery included a long story of how flummoxed the victim was, but it seems they figured it out pretty fast.

        I don't think they went looking for someone, as what would they do if they could identify them? Anyone could have done that with five seconds, and could have done it as a prank or out of irritation. Nothing to be done but fix it and move on.

  3. GlenP Silver badge

    Old School

    We were told that copying the notes down longhand helps with memorising the content - 40 years or so ago handouts of any form were rare and usually confined to specific topics.

    I'm not entirely convinced but I can still drag obscure pieces of maths from the depths of my ageing brain when needed (these days usually trig functions for 3D print designs).

    1. Gerhard den Hollander

      Re: Old School

      Exactly that ...

      plus, it forced you to pay attention, rather then to think you'd have the printouts of the ppt so you can sleep through the lecture ...

      Sheesh, whatever happened to bumming the course notes from your fellow students in exchnage for a few beers because you happened to miss the early morning class .... usually because someone had bummed your notes in exchange for a few beers the night before ....

      Besides that ..

      you had monitors ?

      Luxury ...

      we had a teacher who made handwritten notes on the blackboard

      in about as legible a handwriting as my own

      and who kept talking while making these notes

      which meant he had his back to the class, and was even less comprehensible then

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: Old School

        we had a teacher who made handwritten notes on the blackboard

        in about as legible a handwriting as my own

        and who kept talking while making these notes

        which meant he had his back to the class, and was even less comprehensible then

        I had a maths lecturer who did all that and spoke so quietly that even the front row couldn't hear more than one word in four.

        1. Not Yb Bronze badge

          Re: Old School

          Teaching Assistant I had for Calculus was always talking about seens, coseens, coofs, etc.

          1. Spanners Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Re: Old School

            That reminds me of a chemistry teacher my mum worked with. His London accent was so bad that he pronounced sulphite and sulphate the same!

          2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

            Re: Old School

            I think I know what "seens" and "coseens" are in math.... what's coofs?

        2. cmdrklarg

          Re: Old School

          Back in the day I signed up for a course on robotics, 2 credits to go towards my CS degree. A curse on whoever scheduled the class at 8AM on Mondays *and* Fridays (And it was the only class I had on Friday that semester). It wasn't very useful, as there was no practical info, but it was semi-interesting nonetheless. It was also a ridiculously easy course.

          The professor was the nicest, pleasant old guy. The trouble was that he spoke in such a soft, slow, soooooothing voice that it would just lull you to sleep, especially that early in the morning.

          After few weeks it became readily apparent that skipping the Friday lectures were of no consequence as long as you read the book. Passed with an A too. :)

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Old School

          I had a Statistics professor with such a strong accent that it took me 2 weeks in class before I realized he was, in fact, speaking in English.

          I work with people from all over the world, and enjoy learning about different cultures. But when you are hiring someone for the purpose of communicating complex concepts to others, make sure people can understand them when they talk!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Old School

        An old physics lecturer had neatly hand-written OHP slides with about 20 lines of text on each slide. Projected each line was about 1-2 inches high. Further back than the second row and it was unreadable...

        He compounded this by not giving us photocopies or explaining what it meant. We were expected to write it all down and miraculously understand - and Brownian motion, Eddy currents and over such things can't just be learnt or understood like that...

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Boffin

          Re: Old School

          One of my lecturers used to love showing lots of Western Blot images which are basically fuzzy black blobs on a grey background (example) - this was boring as hell after about the first five and I cannot recall what signalling pathway or whatever she was talking about...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Happy

        Re: Old School

        "we had a teacher who made handwritten notes on the blackboard"

        When I was at Uni, nearly all our lecturers did that. There were two particular ones who represented complete opposites of the spectrum.

        One - our Physical Chemistry lecturer - chain-smoked in class (and he allowed others to smoke too, which I hated as a non-smoker). He had an elegant cursive script and he would write out all the quantum physics equations longhand across the multiple blackboards as he explained them for us to copy down.

        The other - I think he was our Inorganic Chemistry lecturer - wrote almost nothing down apart from chemical equations (and sometimes he even tried speaking those) and read from his own voluminous notes for us to effectively transcribe. And since he was often working to time, he would sometimes read very quickly, so you had to be able to write as quickly. A two-hour lecture could end up as a marathon secretarial exercise.

        At the time, my handwriting was frequently labelled as 'girls' writing' (translation: you can spell, it's legible, and it's neat, whereas the chimps at Twycross are better than me), which frequently contributed to how well your practical write-ups were marked (earning the label 'creep' or 'ass-licker'). I ought to add that - thanks to keyboards - nowadays, I'm nearly with the chimps myself.

        People were always asking to borrow my notes, which I hated. I mean, I didn't know where they'd been - but sometimes wherever it was didn't seem pleasant.

        1. Richard Pennington 1

          Re: Old School

          I am not going to name the lecturer concerned, save to mention that the name started with "Professor Sir". He was lecturing on integral equations during the Long Vacation term at a well-known university in the early 1980s.

          At the beginning of the course, he distributed two 50-page sets of handwritten notes to the class. These notes were, from start to finish, almost completely illegible. He then proceeded to lecture at the blackboard, with his back to the audience, mumbling as he went. The resulting blackboard may as well have been a photocopy of the notes.

          A week or so into the course, a gang of students from XXX College, myself included, decided that radical measures were needed. We got together in one of our rooms, went through the notes line by line, and figured out what was written, what was meant, and (on several occasions) what the errors were (did I mention that every member of the group went on, a year later, to get a First?). By the end of the exercise, we each had a set of notes in our own handwriting, with additional explanations where required, and with the errors corrected.

          At the exams at the end of the course, none of us took the paper on integral equations: there were easier pickings among the other courses. But we knew the material fairly thoroughly. And we strongly suspected that Professor Sir **** achieved his objective: he didn't have to mark a single exam paper.

        2. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: Old School

          I think he was our Inorganic Chemistry lecturer

          Troll?

          1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

            Re: Old School

            Stone me, what a siliceous remark.

      4. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Old School

        "plus, it forced you to pay attention, rather then to think you'd have the printouts of the ppt so you can sleep through the lecture ..."

        Usually, the slides or notes are aids for structuring the lecture and providing a summary, not the totality of what you need to learn. The stuff the lecturer says, questions they ask, and occasions for student participation can often include a lot that's not on the prepared documents.

        That is if the lecturer bothers to do those things. If they come to class with the idea that you can just read their PowerPoint and know everything, then they're probably not bothering to teach otherwise. If they're doing that, you might as well get some copies of their slides and fire them, as the students won't be disadvantaged. Forcing students to manually copy down text from a screen not only doesn't teach them, but it does waste their energy if there is anything useful going on in the lecture. We've automated the process of copying text. Students don't need to do that anymore.

    2. Richard Tobin

      Re: Old School

      Copying down notes does indeed help you remember, but what goes along with that is that the lecturer should also be writing the material on a blackboard, to match the rate at which students can copy it.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        Re: Old School

        it just seems like such a waste of time though.

        (they could have read / recopied those notes as last weeks homework)

        Face to face teacher student time is valuable and should be spent teaching / interacting , not both teacher and students doing a shit impression of the worlds slowest fax machine

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Old School

      "We were told that copying the notes down longhand helps with memorising the content "

      What I see, I forget.

      What I hear, I remember

      What I do, I understand.

      Learning how to take useful notes is a learned skill and greatly helps in understanding the topic. e.g. being able to write notes on what you just heard while still listening to the next part. Not everyone can manage that and need other aids or have spend more time going over the text books afterwards. People are different and learn best in different ways.

      1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
        WTF?

        Re: Old School

        Nasty memories of Swindon College.

        So due to a fuckup, we had two lecturers in the first week, the first one spoke to us at a level we could understand & went into filters at our level, TPTB decided we would have the second one for the remainder of the course.

        Enter Dangermouse as he was quickly dubbed.

        So he asks us if we are all familiar with differentiation & integration, we all reply yes (Filter, differentiator and integrator circuits - For the most part we were all C&G224 TV techs & Industrial Equipment). This is a Electronics\Microcomputer Control systems HNC & we all responded "Yes".

        Every Friday (9-12) we were subjected to degree level math's that most of us couldn't follow as he wrote it on the board.

        He only realised we were totally lost when only three or four barely managed to get past 46% on the end of term test* (One was a maths graduate\refugee from Libya, one was from a degree course dropout who also managed to dropout\lose interest in this course as well**, one was a bearded Alan Moore stunt double & the other decided not to return in the new year as he got a job offer to return to Saudi as a pipeline engineer).

        The remainder of the course was swiftly dumbed down, with most of us scraping a pass.

        * Wise move to schedule the test on the last college day before Christmas, most of us hung over having correctly concluded the test would be a bust & waiting to jump on our modes of transport home the moment the exam is done.

        ** Got himself on another degree course, lost interest in our group project especially when he made a pass at the other group member at a party.

      2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Old School

        Oops, I may have got see and here the wrong way around.

        Hear, forget

        See, remember

        Do, understand. :-)

  4. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

    The idea of copying it is that it's meant to help you remember it. It was for the benefit of the student.

    Whether that has any merit or not I don't have any idea, but I hope this petty little man got what was coming to him.

    1. Fred Daggy Silver badge
      Pint

      I handwrite copious amounts of notes on things I am studying. But, there is a rule: Fast, Accurate, Readable. Pick any 2.

      Depends upon the subject matter and the speed of the lecturer. Some have just wizzed through with barely a thought to the student. Others take time and one can take in the topic - and make notes. Not always the SME the best one to teach in a classroom environment.

      Or better still, go the Open University route and largely drop the lecturer and give the student ample material to draw their own conclusion from.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "I handwrite copious amounts of notes on things I am studying. But, there is a rule: Fast, Accurate, Readable. Pick any 2."

        Amen to this and have an upvote !

        My astronomy teacher at university taught that to me the hard way:

        - he was blasting through the board, while moving and hiding various parts of the board

        - we had to fast copy like crazy to the visible part of the board, changing cadrans each dozens of seconds

        End of the day, accurate, check, fast, yes of course. Readable, fuck no !

        1. Paul Kinsler

          Readable, fuck no !

          I ended up inventing my own shorthand, some of which I can still remember...

          ... should have taught myself some *actual* shorthand, mind, it would probably have been better all round.

    2. chivo243 Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Just after a house move, I had a shopping list, quite long and diverse, because I wrote it all down, I remembered every item at the store while the list was on the kitchen table.

      1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge
        Holmes

        If you write your shopping list on the palm of your hand, you won't forget it.

        Plus you get to look like a lunatic while walking around Morrisons staring at your palm like a demented priest reading from an imaginary bible.

        1. that one in the corner Silver badge

          Most of the list is the same each week - milk, bread, quicklime

          Just get that lot tattooed on your wrist and cross the items off with felt-tip.

          Tell anyone noticing that you're counting The Silence.

          1. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

            rolled up carpet, cattle prod...

            1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
              Devil

              Correction

              Cattle prod batteries..

              And you get the carpet on expenses as "Oops I've just ruined this one with (prussian blue/red ink/toner powder/someone else's blood (delete as applicable))"

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            During my bachelor days, I would tend to get similar things every week. Anything special I would just remember if I need anything special such as a toothbrush. What would happen is that the following week, I would forget that I bought a toothbrush and buy another one!

            1. Terry 6 Silver badge

              Still do. almost 50 years later.

      2. The Axe

        I do shopping lists by noting how many items are needed. That ensures I haven't forgotten anything.

      3. The commentard formerly known as Mister_C
        Coat

        Just sing a little song

        Useful when you need Minestrone, Cauliflower, a new chiller, something to fix your pants, breakfast fare, a vegetable and Listerine.

        Soup and Collies, Fridge, elastic, eggs, peas, halitosis.

        Mine's the one with a list in the pocket...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Just sing a little song

          For some reason that went through my head to the tune of "please pass the pasta", so Listerine came out pronounced "Lister-EE-nee!"

    3. Tim Hines

      "College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either."

      Mark Twain

      1. Evil Scot
        1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          We have a Room 3b doorplate on our spare room, courtesy of the Discworld Emporium.

          1. Anonymous Custard

            Mine's on my study door, from the same source.

  5. Sequin

    I once got a critical leve support call from our data centre telling me that a system had gone wrong and it needed fixing immediately or heads would be rolling. The symprtoms wre that all of the system menus were blank apart from the headings. I jumped in a taxi with all of my support tools and headed up there to discover that they had had somebody in cleaning the keyboards and monitors (an annual event) and the person doing it had managed to turn down the brightness control on the CRT monitor. The menu headings were in high intensity, with the menu options in lower intensity. It had been turned down enough to hide the low intensity text, but you could still see the high intensity text.

    I twiddled the knob, picked up my gear and took a taxi back.

  6. Peter Prof Fox

    Never

    (a) Attend a meeting without an agenda.

    (b) Allow yourself to be sent on a course before checking the actual syllabus.

    Learning is helped by knowing where to attach knowledge to existing knowledge. Having the overview from a proper syllabus clarifies this. It also means that you say to whoever trying to send you on a day/week/month of tedium "I know all this." Save the money and give me time off. Alternatively you might do some background reading or other preparation.

  7. stiine Silver badge

    taking notes...

    Economics class - I took, over the course of the semester, 3/4 of one page of notes. P.W. on my right took two full spiral notebooks worth of notes. O.G. on my left took one full notebook worth of notes. The difference between the two was down to, I think, handwriting size. Before the exam, O.G. asked for my notes, to comare with his notes, to make sure he hadn't missed anything. When I handed him the sheet of paper, he laughed, handed it back, and leaned forward to ask P.W. for her notes. I don't know if it helped but I still got better marks in that course than either of them.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: taking notes...

      So, you were economic with your note taking?

      1. l8gravely

        Re: taking notes...

        It was obviously a micro economics course...

        1. Spanners Silver badge

          Re: taking notes...

          I take it neither the PM or chancellor were in this class?

    2. wub

      Re: taking notes...

      No one seems to have pointed out that the most effective notes are made when the note taker is listening, thinking about the material and therefore able to summarize the information from the lecture in the notes they make.

      Any good lecturer will present a topic in redundant language. Important points get highlighted, often by repetition with variations. Good note takers distill this into a brief summary of the critical aspects. This is incredibly useful, and something that doesn't often make its way into textbooks. (The other reason that lectures can be so effective, in the hands of decent lecturers, is that interactive QA can quickly clear up misconceptions. I know we have all sorts of wonderful, rapid communication in Today's Modern World of the Future (tm) but direct human contact can be a very powerful educational tool.)

      Your notes were effective for you, because you emphasized the aspects of the information that were new and important to you. The other student who laughed and handed them back probably would not have been able to get much out of your notes for that reason, and because he hadn't been able to do that sort of summation for himself.

      For the record, my notes always looked more like the other student. Oh well...

  8. cosymart
    Holmes

    Way Back

    In the late 60s we had a college electronics lecturer who would appear at the start of the lesson, give a quick preamble and place a pile of OHP slides next to the projector and give whichever student was sitting closest the job of feeding the slides onto the OHP. The lecturer would then disappear with the parting words that he would return 5min before the end of the lesson to answer any questions.

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Re: Way Back

      Were those five minutes enough? Sound quite short to me. Or was the material to learn so stretched that only five minutes were enough?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Way Back

      A professor where I went to school was known for showing up for the first day of class only, and then the teaching assistant taught the whole rest of the semester, including grading the tests.

      Given the professor involved, that was probably an improvement over him teaching the course. He had NO interest in teaching, and was only there to do research.

  9. john.w

    Patrick Winston (MIT) Presentation Skill Training

    Patrick Winston allows no laptops or phones in his lectures because, as he explains, we only have one language processor in our brains so if your are writing you are not listening.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

    1. Dave314159ggggdffsdds Silver badge

      Re: Patrick Winston (MIT) Presentation Skill Training

      Writing and listening - or reading and speaking, etc - at the same time are essential skills for any married person.

      Seriously, though, it's not hard to learn to buffer and timeshare the single processor even if you can't do both at the same time - though being able to is actually pretty common, especially among kids. Deciding what to write requires the processor for a slice of time, but moving the pen is an automatic action during which you can process stored audio. Switching between the two maybe once a second or so is easy enough, the effect is you keep up a complete flow of both.

      Whether there's any spare capacity left over for learning, though, is a different story.

  10. NXM Silver badge

    Maxwell

    We had a lecturer who would write a torrent of Maxwell's equations on board after board. At the time I thought, oh yes, that makes sense, and wrote lots of notes. Half an hour later I didn't understand any of it, even after reading the notes.

    Then next time he'd say, now where was I? And he'd start with the very next line of more equations. I never understood how he remembered exactly where he was for every one of his lectures to everyone.

    1. tiggity Silver badge

      Re: Maxwell

      Demonic skills?

    2. Stephen478

      Re: Maxwell

      How would you know if he got it wrong?

      1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: Maxwell

        At least I learned at Swindon College to use those (Different tutor to Dangermouse).

    3. snowpages

      Re: Maxwell

      I think I had that lecturer too...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Maxwell

      There is a story of a university lecturer who regularly would scribble complex equations on the board at high speed while saying something like "It is obvious that....".

      One day he.suddenly stopped in the middle of writing an equation on the board and left the room. He came back a few minutes later to finish it while saying "It is obvious that....".

  11. rfrazier

    Hand written notes.

    i remember reading some research, perhaps done at the USAF Academy, which indicated that taking notes by hand resulted in much better retention of the material. I've always recommended taking notes by hand to my students, but leave the final choice up to them, providing handouts when appropriate, or requested. (University level philosophy.)

    Best wishes,

    Bob

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Hand written notes.

      I don't know about the form of writing, but I agree that taking notes helps with learning. That doesn't prevent handouts being useful. The notes the student writes should be their judgement on important content from what's being said, not a copy of information that they won't get to see again. If just having the lecture notes isn't enough, which it usually isn't, they need to note extra things in whatever structure they think best helps them to study. If just having the lecture notes is the same as the lecture, then the lecturer isn't useful.

      1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

        Re: Hand written notes.

        I always found it helpful to get the handout before class, and write my notes directly on the handout.

        "If just having the lecture notes is the same as the lecture, then the lecturer isn't useful." The worst course I took was Organic Chemistry, the professor literally wrote the textbook. Unfortunately the textbook was simply a compilation of previous years' lecture notes, which he then proceeded to read verbatim during each lecture, complete with overhead slides of the same graphics in the textbook. The same professor taught both semesters. Needless to say I don't remember much of Organic Chemistry.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Hand written notes.

          There should be some kind of rule prohibiting a professor from writing their own textbook for a class. If the professor's bad and the book is too, things are not good. I had a textbook written by a professor at my university. He was very proud of it, but I didn't find anyone who thought it was good. The only reason I learned anything was that a different professor was teaching the class that term. The responsible professor had already done his damnedest on a different course, so I know he couldn't write course materials that any student could understand or learn from.

          This became awkward (just for me, but I certainly felt awkward) when I met him as a possible research advisor. He was nice, seemed happy for me to join his team, and was researching something I found interesting, but I ended up going to a different team just because I'd spent so much of a previous term hating his textbook.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Hand written notes.

            I had a professor for Thermodynamics (a weed-out course) who wrote his own book. He was scary in class - often acted angry, kinda stomped around, and had A Thing about cellphones going off. (On Day 1, he announced that anyone whose phone rung during class would get a 0% on a test, and there would only be one warning. A couple weeks later, someone's phone rang; he said "That's the warning for the class.") It didn't help that the classrooom was so big as to need stadium seating; the area he taught in was on the ground floor, and the back chairs were on the second floor.

            I was failing the class as the lecture was exactly the same as the book, and I didn't get a crucial bit. I finally broke down and visited him in his office, where he was shockingly nice and polite, and in a couple sentences explained what I hadn't understood. I ended up with a hard-fought C, the minimum necessary to proceed with the next course.

  12. Big_Boomer Silver badge

    Understanding is where it's at!

    If you had these issues with mumbling lecturers, poor screen displays, inability to write whilst listening, etc. why didn't you raise that fact with the lecturer? If I attend a lecture and cannot hear them, then I ask them to speak up or use a PA system. If I cannot see/read the screen I say so and refuse to let them continue until I can see/read. Yes, you will mark yourself out but most teachers/lecturers WANT their students to learn and will take an active role in assisting those who actively show an interest, so long as you don't make too much of nuisance of yourself. If you just sit there like a blancmange hoping to absorb the information by osmosis and gain understanding by some miracle, then you are failing the teacher, yourself, and whoever is paying for your training. Get involved, ask questions, speak up if you have an issue or don't understand. The whole point of them and you being there is for you to learn. If you are there just to pass an exam and then forget it all, then you are wasting everyone's time, your own included.

    I had a deaf mate who had major issues in lectures because whilst he was an accomplished lipreader that didn't help if the lecturer was marching up and down, often facing away from him. He was one of the first people I ever saw who videoed his lectures (with permission), mostly so he could watch them back and pause/rewind whilst making his notes. He also asked all his lecturers to face forwards when talking, which most did. He did better than most of the "tourists" because he gave a damn and paid attention and wanted to understand. We used to read each others notes and it often astounded me what he got from each lecture that had gone right over my head,...and vice-versa.

  13. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    The one I baulked at

    A teacher who rapidly copied notes out of a text book to a roller blackboard faster than I could keep up with. Then I noticed he was copying verbatim from the same text book as all of us had been issued with.

    The next time I was prepared. I wrote the first line, then quickly scanned through the text book to find it and wrote down the page number. I then daydreamed for most of the 'lesson' and when it ended quickly jotted down the last line on the board. I could now study the entire subject at my leisure.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: The one I baulked at

      Sounds like the sort of lecturer who sees his teaching duties as a necessary evil that wastes valuable research time on his pet project. He could have saved everyone some time by walking into the lecture hall, announcing the book title and page range, then walking back out. But he probably had a certain amount of time booked in his contract so did what he did on autopilot while spending the time thinking about his "real" job.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The one I baulked at

        A retired friend is an emeritus professor at a leading UK university. He said it was nice to still have things like the overseas trips for research collaborations - but no longer have to teach. In his recent years he had found that many first year students needed a foundation year's remedial maths tuition - as the "A" level education standard had fallen so far.

  14. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
    Meh

    Swindon Again

    I missed taking down a complete diagram of logic states pertaining to shift registers & didn't bum a copy from anyone else..

    Unfortunately it came up in the exam.

    Fortunately it stated "A shift register has been designed to do X function - Work out the error states & design the reset circuit". Logic was my strong point* & found it easy to do this largely in my head with some paper "working it out notes", calculate them & design the reset circuit. I finished the exam in record time & was sat twiddling my thumbs

    I was somewhat pissed to miss the Distinction grade by 1% due to the fact that everyone else had recreated the shift register diagram first & then created their design in their workings out.

    * Commented on by OEM Tutor at Sercel, when drawing up the timing logic for Syledis offshore positioning systems & in a Electronics hobbyist shop, when he caught sight of my memory map to control a range of accessories in a fairly basic Amstrad SRD510 satellite receiver from the unused logic driving the 7 segment display LEDs which weren't included on that model.

    1. NXM Silver badge

      Re: Swindon Again

      I had a related experience: we were required to design a dice circuit outputting to 7 LEDs. I could've done it they way they intended with logic, but I decided to reduce the design time and do it with a fast clock and a suitably programmed eprom.

      I got no marks, even though the task didn't specify how it should've been done. At the time I didn't kick up, but I certainly would now!

      It still rankles 40 years later.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Swindon Again

        Any innovative answer is likely beyond the capacity of the person marking the paper. I spent a career fixing HW/SW problems which the "experts" declared were "impossible" to solve using their normal approaches.

        One of my favourite sayings is still "More than one way to skin a cat".

      2. Big_Boomer Silver badge

        Digital Dice

        I built a digital dice using the exact same method. There were 4 circuits (for up to 4 dice) and you could select D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, or D20 for each circuit. It would count 1-4 or 1-6,... or 1-20 and then start over at 1. The output was displayed on a 7segment LED for each circuit. The clock ran at 330kHz and it counted for as long as you pressed the roll button so the time the button was pressed was the "random" element as there is no way you could stop the clock when you wanted to. Our DM was a college lecturer and he asked me if he could borrow it one week to test if it was truly random. He had his students test it for compliance with the principles of randomness and it completely nailed the test. I still have it in a dark cupboard in the garage somewhere.

  15. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Notes!!!

    At university (around 2000), we didn't have anybody GIVE us the slides. They were in a file, and we could print them on a home printer, or pay per page to use the university's printers.

    Once of my comp sci professors hated Microsoft products enough (and apparently was not aware of OpenOffice...which is what I used) that they had all their slides on a sheet of that overhead projector stuff, turn the crank and the next slide comes into view. Which was odd.

    One of my other classes the prof had those "let's just put like 5 giant words on each slide" slides, I kept having people ask me how I managed to get like 6 or 8 slides per page... unfortunately for them, I was using the "nup" program in Linux so when I told them I printed to (Postscript) file, ran that through nup and printed it, it really didn't help any. (No cups yet, so nup printing was not built into the print dialog yet.) The U's pay-per-page HPs, the HP Windows driver of the time was fairly elaborate and did support n-up printing, but only 2 per page.)

  16. mtp
    Headmaster

    Overhead projector rolls were the worst

    I was at uni in the era of overhead projectors. The single sheets were bad enough but one of our lecturers (I think it was thermodynamics) used the continual strip on rollers and slowly wound it on as he talked. He gave out no notes so every lecture was just frantically copying the content including graphs into our notebooks. It was basically impossible to keep up so the notes were very poor. He was explaning the content as it was passing by but we were far too focussed on copying to listen to a word he said.

    In hindsight it might have been better to ignore the visuals and just listen to him but I really don't know as I never had time to find out what he said.

    Our lecturer in stellar dynamics had the opposite strategy and on day 1 handed each of us a copy of the notes. From then on we listened to everything he said and annotated our notes as appropriate. Thank you Kaz Krynicki - you were great (sadly I just googled him and he died in 2019). No idea who the thermodynamics lecturer was.

  17. PRR Bronze badge

    In my wasted years, I had two lecturers who did not follow a book and held most of the class spellbound for 90 minutes. Albert Blumberg lectured in Philosophy and Logic, seemed to have a fully developed syllabus in his head, talked about each sub-topic clearly and methodically. The majors took notes; I didn't. (And I did not know about his political activities until just now.) Wilson Carey McWilliams, Political Science, had no agenda except the course title. Each lecture was an extended exploration of whatever he wanted to talk about. Making connections between people, movements, money, and politics. (No shock he also a prolific essayist.) Again the majors took detailed notes, he (and his father) were the Font Of Wisdom in the field. Being invited to a post-class drinking session meant you had a future in the field. I don't remember how or why I got a grade. You could not be tested on how his mind wandered a subject.

  18. Ken Y-N
    Coat

    They had put the screen out front as the lecturer had lost his voice, but they should have known better than to put the CRT before the hoarse.

  19. TSM

    When I was at uni - around 30 years ago, sigh - what the lecturers wrote on the blackboard was generally what we would write in our notes; the additional discussion, Q&A, etc. was not normally written down although of course you could do so if there was something you found illuminating. Overhead projectors with the continuous rolls were used usually to supplement, for instance if they had been asked to explain something in the main notes and wanted to draw a diagram, or if they wanted to show something that would have taken a lot of time and effort to draw by hand. When I did my honours dissertation presentation it was all on OHP transparencies.

    I remember the first time we saw a computer projection in one of our classes - it was not done the same way as today; there was a special backless LCD (I think) monitor that could be put on top of the overhead projector like a fancy, animated transparency. Because everyone had overhead projectors and almost nobody had a dedicated computer projector.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In my secondary school days in the 1960s - the teachers wrote in chalk on boards. The "board" was a tall box containing a continuous looped belt surface of which only the front half was visible at any time***.

    As he wrote the teacher moved the surface upwards in stages. You had to make your notes before the writing disappeared over the top roller. When it reappeared at the bottom the teacher erased it and carried on his current writing.

    The "A" Level Maths senior teacher wrote at a prodigious speed. My notes were incomplete, illegible, and my comprehension almost zero.

    ***Like a treadmill but vertical.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When learning something new I have found:

    1) play with it yourself first

    2) go on a course when you are then competent to understand the nuances and ask meaningful questions

    3) afterwards consolidate your knowledge by using it to do something interesting

    Too many companies send people on a course without relevant prior experience. The students then quickly hit a state of "sponge full" and fail to absorb much after the first few hours of lecturing. Then they are not asked/allowed to use the knowledge immediately afterwards.

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