#Based on my personal experience with polish education system up to uni and my friend's experience at uni

[littleteacupdragon]

I think the education system took a completely wrong approach to taking notes. (I'm saying this after spending 6h over the last three days on re-doing half of my notes from geography because I thought it'd be a better way to revise than just reading them).

What I mean is, the whole "write down all you can from the lecture as the teacher speaks" is so impractical. And quite a few teachers in my life demanded them to be word-for-word, or at least when they were asking questions they demanded completely identical answers to what they said.

And that's bullshit? And it doesn't help you learn?

It's basically equal to writing something down straight from the book, just with added stress that ohmygod they're taking so fast I can't write fast enough ohmygod. And it leaves most students focusing entirely on getting the words on the pages, without any understanding of what they're hearing, not actually. Just like a lot of people can't read something out loud and then actually remember what they read - the focus is in an entire different place.

Lectures are for an actual human being to explain completely new concepts or variations and details of a concept. They're there to help people understand, because brains are just weird like that, when someone explains something, they remember better. Not to mention that an actual human being can alter the way they explain things, depending on the group. And that's something you can't find in books.

For example, my geography teacher used the fact that a few students in my class were from this one town that's in "rivalry" with the one he's from, you know, the usual "one is better than the other" thing. It was all jokes! But he used the fact that we all were aware and amused by it to give examples for some geographical phenomenon. This was after we were done with writing down whatever was on the board.

With this current arrangement, the work of a lecturer is almost pointless. And if they're there only to recite the book, the presence of them is only more pointless, not to mention a waste of time for both sides.

It results in students leaving the classroom and already having forgotten what the lesson was about. It results in them not understanding the notes they took and being overall more confused about the subject. It makes it harder to learn, and it makes it take much more additional time to learn.

Maybe if it was more so that the lecture going on and the student's were required to note only the basic points/titles/words needing definitions and then when they came home they could use the knowledge and understanding they obtained during actually listening to the lecture and work with a book as an assistant to write down those certain definitions or add some details they know would help their personal type of learning better...

Just, conscious, present, engaging with the topic once more. Making those memory links stronger. Making going to school actually worth the time end energy.