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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Yup. The way to attend a lecture is to leave your laptop behind. Take a cheap spiral notebook and a couple colored pens.

Take notes.

Once the notebook is filled (or the semester is over) scan the pages, toss the notebook, and buy a fresh one for the next semester.

It works, from much personal experience You're welcome!

1. yes, sometimes I fall behind the lecturer taking notes, which can be a bit frustrating

2. while the notes may not be complete, they trigger the context of the lecture which works

3. reading my notes from 40 years ago - they don't make much sense, as the context is forgotten

4. I wish I had made audio recordings of the lectures. But that was impractical, as I could not afford the cassette tapes required

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This only works with old-school professors who teach by writing on the blackboard. New-school professors like to bombard you with one-hour, 50-slide Powerpoint presentations where each slide has a full page of text in 12-point font, with a smattering of images and diagrams throughout. Since the prof does not need to take time to write anything down, they have no qualms about showing one of these slides for a total of 10 seconds before jumping to the next.

Of course, the nice new-school profs will provide their slide deck as a download some time later that day. The nicer ones will provide the slide deck at least one hour before class, giving you a chance to download it so you can follow along. And the really nice ones will provide the slides in a format with plenty of space along the sides to take your own notes. This works great either for printing out and taking notes directly on the page or for making notes on an iPad or Windows tablet (with OneNote).

> This only works with old-school professors who teach by writing on the blackboard.

I was lucky to complete college before powerpoint.

This never worked for me. The physical process of writing is just so slow and awkward that it distracts me and inhibits learning. Yes, I tried using higher quality pens and different writing techniques. Nothing really helped. So forget writing by hand, for me it's worse than useless. YMMV.

Practice improves this, I suppose as you age it's harder to get that commitment to becoming a speedy note-taker, but I share the sentiment among many that speed is not necessarily a deal breaker. I can barely decipher my scribbles after the fact, but doubling down on the neural pathways is a deal breaker.

I practiced for literally decades. It didn't help much.

The problem with that is working with the notes later. My method of learning included reorganizing, rewriting, extending notes because it’s very rare that you’re able to write things down properly on the go and fill in the gaps.

That’s very unreasonable to do in written notes, it ends up a complete mess and takes a lot of time.

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