241–250 of 255 posts
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Please don't tell someone what words they are allowed to use in what contexts.
1. "Please don't" is hardly offensive or authoritative. 2. If you disagree, you were laughably hypocritical in your post.
If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to become star pupils once you take away their distractions. Perhaps kids attend more lectures than before knowing that they can always listen in while futzing with other things (and otherwise, they may skip some of the classes entirely). The lecture format is what needs changing. You need a reason to go to class, and there was nothing worse than a professor showing slide…
As soon as a lecture brought out slides, I knew my mark was going to be abysmal in that class. Thankfully I recognized that and in my later years promptly dropped those classes.
Most lecturers tended to post their content online (either as a .ppt or as a scanned pdf).
People realised that with all of the notes provided in advance there wasn't a huge incentive for them to be physically present for the lectures and the theatre would get progressively emptier throughout the semester. I admit I skipped more than a few lectures during course of my degree did not feel like I missed anything particularly relevant.
At my university the lectures were supplemented by "tutorials" - wikipedia tells me this is an Australian thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial) essentially the lectures were 150+ people sitting in a theatre taught by a Professor and the tutorials were usually 10-20 people in a classroom overseen by a postgrad student. We'd spend the tutorial reviewing what was covered in the previous lecture and working through problem sets in a small group. It had the benefit that you would be able to get 1 on 1 attention from the tutor if you needed it. Most lecturers would not even field questions during their lectures whilst the tutors would allow you to email them question etc outside of classroom which was very helpful.
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The reason hand written notes are more effective is that it helps towards better learning just by writing the thing down and slowing it to a pace where your mind can make memories. Even if afterwards the notes are completely illegible, I would argue it's more effective than typed notes.
I've always wondered about this. What makes handwriting different from typing in terms of memory recall, other than the fact that most, if not everyone, have written with pen and paper for far longer than typing?
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Speaking of inaccurate headlines: I know I was better off with a TI-85 in math class, so students don't necessarily have a problem with a computing device itself in a classroom environment as the headline would suggest.
You'd probably be better off with something like a casio fx-115es plus (non graphing scientific calculator). For example: You'd have to remember your integration tables better on not rely on the graphing functions to pull you out of the bog.
I went to college just as laptops were starting to become ubiquitous, but I never saw the point of them in class. I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type. Even for topics where you can write prose notes, I always found it more helpful to be able to arrange them spatially in a way that made sense rather than…
I think devices like the surface pro have shown that we have the technology needed for more advanced io now - we just need proper CAD programs and symbolic math packages that work well with pen/touch input - much along the lines of original Sketchpad[s]. In the same vein, I think "notebooks" of the Jupyter style for R, mathlab or Julia etc - could be a great addition to many classes - allowing interactive exploration…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia There's a very specific part of the brain responsible for the movement planning and fine motor control required for writing. Some folks have it underdeveloped, and need to spend an inordinate amount of effort and concentration in order to write. And even then, their writing will often degrade over time as they fatigue.
Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).
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Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).
I can say that in my case my 6th grade teacher started paying close attention and noticed that when I was trying my hardest to be neat I was doing like my peer at their worst. He had the school counselors do some tests which didn't result in anything other that agreement that I have an inability to write neat. I first head about Dysgraphia 10 right here though - the symptoms a familiar enough for a self-diagnosis, bu…
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Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.
True, but Compuguy was not referring to people with medical conditions in my opinion. He is referring to the "many" that don't want make a concentrated effort to improve their handwriting but could if they did. If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exem…
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Some of us also have terrible handwriting, so taking notes by hand is out of the question. Though I will also surmise that they can also be a distraction.
In 15 years of studies, I have never ever heard anyone complaining about his own handwriting. Even with a handwriting that can be very bad for others, one can always reread 99.9% of what one has written, because it is one's own handwriting and one knows its quirks. This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school. That's bullshit of the sam…