Note perfect
The art of writing down precious things
I have an intimate relationship with my notebook. Or notebooks, I should say. There is one for work, one for blog ideas, one I take to conferences, and one just full of stuff about assessment. They are a messy, unkempt, loosely ordered library containing things that I once thought notable. This post itself began life in those fertile pages.
Noting happens when I read, when I listen, when I discuss, when I contemplate, and even between bouts of sleep and day dreaming. I capture precious things so that my equally disordered mind doesn’t misplace them. My notebook is a safe place.
What goes in there?
Things that resonate. Things that surprise. Things I don’t want to forget. Things that may be useful later.
Things that connect to other things, although I don’t yet know quite how.
My notebooks contain quotes, copied verbatim (with a reference attached - I learnt the hard way what happens when you don't do this).
And there are questions, half formed critiques and throwaway judgements.
These notes are often scribbled in roughly the order in which new information or thoughts are encountered. They show the chronology of my encounters with interesting things. If you were to flick through one of these notebooks you will find words, phrases, and occasional sentences alongside diagrams, sketches, and even schematics. Other peoples’ words are paraphrased or rephrased in ways that fit better into the jigsaw of my mental models. Concepts are connected by arrows; items connected by bracketed pointers; asides appear as footnotes or callouts. These notes are a map of a fractured history of thought, but not a map that anyone else could follow. They are encrypted. My entire mind is required to unlock this code.
Am I an expert notetaker? If expertise is measured by whether the act of noting gets me closer to my goals, then yes. Goals are the first thing expert notetakers require. My goals are to write, to see things more clearly, to solve problems, to become more effective in my professional pursuits - but mostly to satisfy my curiosity and quieten the noise that creates pointless anxiety in me.
Practice is the second thing required. Learning through experience what is useful later; how much to record so that it makes sense to my future self.
And lastly the expert notetaker needs enough domain knowledge to determine what is meaningful, useful or pertinent. The more knowledge of a domain I already possess, the fewer notes I will take. Why? Because less is new (or news!); because I am more discerning; because what is written down is not what others have said, but what I think about what others have said. My insights synthesise larger fields of information, semantically lighter, not down in the weeds.
My notebooks are messy because our encounters with the world lack neatness.
When I look back at my notes, some things make no sense, whilst others have new meaning. New connections are made. This is where creativity begins - the bringing together of previously unconnected ideas to generate new insights.
Do we give the gift of noting to the children in our schools? When I flick through a student’s exercise book I wonder if we are encouraging the right habits - cherishing disorder, fluidity, partiality, and emergence. Or are we rewarding order, neatness, and structure? Do we make them write things that are precious to us but not valuable to them? What simplistic judgements do we make about the quality of their notes, therefore of the quality of their minds?
Of course, children are not experts: neither in the art of notetaking or in the domains they study. Their efforts need scaffolding.
Neither do children hold goals the way adults do, or to always have the self-discipline to pursue them. Theirs are more immediate and open to corruption. And they may not match with what we would like their goals to be.
None-the-less, before we comment with mild sarcasm that their books look like a spider has crawled across the page, before we tell them to rewrite it neatly, before we chastise them for not copying everything down from the board, we should question how certain we are about what these notes are for, who they are for, and what they represent. How different are they really from our own attempts to capture what feels novel, valuable, and precious?