A Quick Lecture Run-Down

Before I came to university, I had a notion that lectures were going to be awkward to get through. You'd have to take notes all the time while following the lecturer and I thought it would be impossible to keep up at all.

My mind was as wrong as your everyday internet troll. It hadn't even taken into account the existence of whiteboards - it only thought about projector screens which didn't have anything on them to aid understanding, and having to write all the undecipherable equations down, making it difficult to listen. (And in fairness to past me, my ears do tend to turn off when I'm copying off of the whiteboard, but whiteboard writing stays up longer and needs rubbing off sometimes. And I can actually understand what I'm writing too)

Real lectures are hardly like that at all. In fact, plenty of lecturers just hand you the flipping notes. You just have to keep up with what's going on and maybe annotate bits of information as you go through it all. Maybe you'll end up going right back to the beginning and learn where techniques come from in the first place, maybe you're picking up on all this new stuff with new symbols and methods, or maybe your lecturer will try and bribe a graph of x² (with money) to give a value for x where y = -1 to demonstrate that there is no real answer for it. It's good to have a sense of humor when half of what you're covering is known by half the lecture hall.

Even the more 'note'-worthy lecturers are pretty cool. (And I have noted that pun as one of the worst puns I have ever made up. I apologize for this and the notation around the word 'note'. A Minim sure likes a pun about 'notes.' It's terrible) And at least one of them puts all of his notes online where you can find them. Taking notes is a good thing that you can do with your hands, and copying stuff can be a good way to learn things, too. Maybe you're revisiting the definition of an angle (proper angles work in radians here, because if you draw a circle of radius 1 around the point, the angle between the two lines would just be the length of the arc between them). Maybe you're playing around with new terms.

Of course, the most on-hands module has the most on-hands approach, with the lectures just being used to tackle some of the most common problems that people were coming up with, while much of the learning is done by going through and doing stuff and just simply asking about it. Maybe simply asking about things isn't in a Minim's nature, but doing the work and using the resources available is, and so this means that a Minim is very satisfied.