7
The Secret of Merging with Your Instructor’s Mind
In
any school situation, what the instructor or lecturer says in the
classroom may be as important as any single book or article assigned for
reading.
Of course, some teachers communicate better than others. But it’s wise
not to be too quick to criticize any teacher or discount what he says in
class. A major reason for listening closely is that even the most inept
instructors will usually be directly involved in devising and grading your
tests. Lectures are one way to determine how the teacher thinks and
what he’s likely to include on exams. So the better you can understand
how your teacher’s mind works, the more impressive your performance
is likely to be on his tests.
Even under the best of circumstances, taking
effective notes in class
can be tedious. And the challenge with some disorganized lecturers may
seem downright impossible.
Julie’s Great Challenge in Psychology Class
One of our students, Julie, was almost in tears. “I know I’m going to fail
psychology!” she told her Evelyn Wood instructor. “I can’t understand a
thing the lecturer is saying in this course!”
To get a better idea of the problem Julie was facing, the reading
instructor, Bob, made an appointment to attend the class with Julie. Just
before the lecture began, they took seats together at the back of the
room, and when the teacher arrived and began speaking, both began to
jot down notes.
By the end of the class, Julie had filled four-and-a-half word-packed
pages with paragraph after paragraph of sentences. Bob, in contrast, had
constructed a slash recall pattern on one page.
As the other students were getting up to leave, Julie looked curiously
at Bob’s notes. But before they could really get into a conversation about
his evaluation of the class or his technique, they looked up and found
the lecturer standing beside them.
“Please
sit down,” the lecturer said, and Julie and Bob immediately
fell back into their seats, expecting a reprimand. After all,
Bob was
something of an interloper.
After looking the instructor up and down a couple of times, the
lecturer asked, “Okay, who are you?”
Bob gave his name and said he was from the Evelyn Wood reading
program. “Julie’s taking my class because she’s afraid she’s going to fail
yours,” he continued. “So I told her I’d come here and listen to you and
try to help her with note-taking techniques for the lectures.”
“What’s that?” the psychology lecturer asked, pointing at the slash
recall pattern.
“My notes,” the reading expert said. Then,
he proceeded to explain
how a slash recall was structured and showed how the psychology talk
fit on the different branches of the outline.
“When you began the lecture, you said you were going to talk about
emotions,” Bob said. “Then, you said you
weren’t
going to talk about
emotion, but you
were
going to cover motivation and eating, including
why people are overweight. You can see that here, here and here, I
wrote down key words to remind me of what you were saying.”
Bob’s explanations were quite civil and polite.
But as he talked, it
became clear to all how disorganized the lecture had been.
Finally, the psychology lecturer, who was actually a teaching graduate
student, broke in with some disarming honesty: “I wasn’t very organized,
was I?”
“Well …”
“Can you show me what I can do to give more organized lectures?”
That was a totally unexpected response. Bob recovered quickly and
described how an organized talk might be constructed with a slash recall
pattern. The lecturer listened intently, asked a number of in-depth
questions and actually practiced drawing several rough recall patterns,
which Bob critiqued. As for Julie, she picked
up the essentials of the
slash recall, which she resolved to use in future note-taking.
After this incident, the lecturer’s performance improved markedly.
And Julie began to get much more out of the course—both because she
was now employing the slash recall and because her lecturer was using
it. Bob, the Wood-Britannica instructor, never did learn how well Julie
did on her grades, but apparently the problems that she had been
experiencing with incomprehensible lectures were no longer a concern.
When I first heard this story, I had some
trouble believing that a
lecturer would have been so open about his deficiencies and so ready to
alter his own note-taking and lecture style. Most teachers I’ve known
would become rather defensive when confronted with even the indirect,
gentle criticism that was offered in this encounter.
But this psychology lecturer really did want to improve, and his
willingness to acknowledge his own flaws and try a new approach to
organizing his lectures paid off.
Even if your teacher fails to change his or her ways in the classroom,
you can still maximize your understanding and recording of key oral
information. The secret: Simply employ the
recall pattern techniques
that Julie’s reading instructor used.
How does this work? Much of what you’ve learned about using recall
patterns with written materials will apply to lectures, but there are a few
distinctive features that bear further discussion.
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