by Cal Newport
All of these historians, however, looked at the history of Rome in the years 250–500 from a point of view that geographically was very narrow. These historians lived, after all, in a world where the center of European civilization was no longer the Mediterranean Sea, but Northwestern Europe. They focused, then, on what France and Britain looked like in the 6th century A.D., and assumed that Northwest Europe was the natural heir to classical antiquity. In fact, only in the Latin West was there anything like a decline and fall, and even there the collapse was administrative. It was not an immediate or huge catastrophe, but a gradual ebb of Roman influence over those areas that had begun in the 3rd century.2
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Notes on excerpt:
QUESTION: Was there really a big “fall” of the Roman Empire?
• Roman Empire having a catastrophic decline and fall, at the hands of savage barbarians, popular idea since eighteenth century.
• Edward Gibbon—wrote book blaming fall on Christians and barbarians. Christian beliefs replaced heroic virtues, weakened military, let barbarians take over.
• Rostovsteff and Toynbee—wrote books with similar arguments
– EXCEPT: Not Christians’ fault, but social and political problems that led to weak empire.
• HOWEVER: These views are “geographically narrow.”
– Authors lived in Europe, so they focused on Europe, only place where it looked like Empire had a big fall.
– Loss of power in Mediterranean region not nearly so pronounced…no real big decline and fall there.
CONCLUSION: The idea of a catastrophic decline and fall of the Roman Empire became popular in European circles, but it overstates reality…too much emphasis on what happened to the Empire in Europe.
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The Discussion Exception
Nontechnical courses will occasionally make use of the class discussion format, in which the professor lets the students lead a discussion on a preselected topic or group of topics. The note-taking strategies described above will not fit this environment. When students lead a discussion, you should no longer expect neatly packaged big ideas. Instead, you end up with a lot of random observations surrounding the occasional gem, so in this circumstance, employ the following simplified note-taking strategy:
Clearly label the topic of the discussion. If a student makes a point that strikes you as insightful, jot it down. If you think up a point that strikes you as insightful, first jot it down, then raise your hand and offer it to the class. Participation keeps you focused. If a student says something you feel is mistaken or irrelevant, just ignore it. And, most important, if the professor chimes in, write down what he says and underline it several times. You better believe that his points are insightful. By the end of class, you will be left with a topic followed by a relatively short list of interesting insights. That’s all you need. Discussions are supposed to help jog your thinking and perhaps offer interesting ideas for upcoming paper assignments. This approach to note-taking focuses on that goal by identifying only interesting insights and encouraging you to synthesize your own.
Take Smart Notes in Technical Courses (Where’s the Problem?)
Technical courses describe any subject that makes heavy use of mathematical formulas or computer code—for example, math, science, engineering, economics, computer science, and quantitative social science. The note-taking strategies for these courses differ significantly from the strategies we just covered for nontechnical courses. In fact, the strategies here are actually much simpler. As Greta, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, explains, for technical courses you should focus on “capturing lots of detailed explanations of problems…the more notes the better.” In other words, you can forget about big ideas. The key to taking notes in a technical course is to record as many sample problems as possible. When you study, these sample problems will prove to be your most important resource. Accordingly, your entire focus in a technical class should be to write down, as faithfully as possible, the steady stream of examples provided by your professor. Let’s take a closer look at how to do this:
Don’t Read Your Assignments, but Do Keep Them Handy
Most technical courses have assigned reading. These readings are usually textbook chapters, and they typically focus on a specific technique or formula. Don’t do this reading. It may sound blasphemous, but it’s the reality of college-level technical courses: Very few students actually do the technical reading ahead of time. Why? Because the exact same material will be covered in class. If you don’t understand a topic after it’s presented by the professor, then you can go back and use the reading to help fill in the blanks. This ordering of events is much more efficient.
What you should do, however, is bring your reading to class. Smart students follow the professor’s examples with their textbook open. This significantly improves your understanding of the techniques the first time they are presented, and it helps sharpen your questions when you get lost. Make sure that you have your assigned reading material gathered and ready to go before class begins.
Prioritize Your Note-taking
In a perfect world, you would successfully capture every single problem discussed in class, as well as every single answer, and all the steps in between. Don’t expect this to happen. Professors move too quickly for you to record all of their examples, so you must learn to prioritize your note-taking.
First priority: Record the problem statement and answer.
Even in the fastest class, there should be time to jot down the questions and final solutions. If you’re in the middle of writing down steps when the professor gives the answer and moves on to the next problem, skip the rest of the steps, record the answer, and move on too. You can try to come back during a lull to fill in more of the steps (so leave space), but even if you don’t, having only the problem and answer will still be useful for review later.
Second priority: Question the confusing.
Students who do well in technical courses are those who closely follow the problems being presented and then insist on asking questions when they don’t understand a specific step. Is this annoying? A little bit. Does it really improve your understanding of the techniques being presented? Absolutely. If you can’t ask a question, then at least clearly mark where you got confused. Write a bunch of question marks or circle the line in your notes; this will help you later when you study. Remember, however, the more questions you get answered in class, the less legwork you will have to do later. So raise your hand, be confident, and ask away!
Third priority: Record the steps of the sample problem.
The reality of technical courses is that the professor usually goes slow only on the first sample problem presented for a new technique. These are usually the only sample problems for which you can capture all of the steps. So pay particular attention at the beginning of the discussion, and don’t get discouraged if subsequent problems fly by too fast for you to record all of the intermediate steps.
Final priority: Annotate the steps.
If you get ahead of the professor on a given problem, and you have time to kill, annotate the steps with little explanations of what they accomplish or why they’re important. In the cases where you do have time for these annotations, they will prove immensely useful when you review.
Step 2
Demote Your Assignments
Most students spend way too much time on reading assignments and problem sets, causing them to feel constantly overwhelmed by their work. This is a problem. If day-to-day assignments dominate your schedule, then there is no time left to prepare properly for the bigger exams and projects.
Straight-A students hate excessive schoolwork just as much as the next student, which is why they have mastered the art of minimizing the time spent on assignments while still learning exactly what they need to know. This chapter details their strategies for powering through readings and problem sets with a minimum of stress. Foll
ow this advice, and your assignments will be reduced from a source of energy-draining tedium into manageable tasks you can actually learn from.
Work Constantly
Most college students depend on “day-before” assignment planning, meaning they never start an assignment until the day before it’s due. This might be the simplest scheduling decision, but it creates many problems. Large assignments will quickly transform from potentially interesting to tedious to painful when tackled in one monolithic, last-minute chunk of time. And, if two or more assignments happen to be due on the same day (which will happen often), you will be forced into a frenzied work marathon that will produce lackluster results at best.
Smart students avoid these issues by working constantly on assignments, in small chunks, every day. “I try to sit down every Sunday night and plan out the week,” explains Simon, a straight-A student from Brown. “My goal is to make sure that I don’t have too much work on busy days and that I do at least a little bit each day.”
For example, if you have a problem set due every week, complete one problem a day, one hour at a time. Don’t spend five hours the night before. The same goes for reading assignments—knock off a chapter a day, and you’ll never find yourself spending a lonely night with a textbook and a six-pack of Red Bull.
Bear in mind that even if you get caught up on all of your assignments for a given class, you should continue to work. For example, if it’s Sunday morning and you have already finished your reading for Monday’s history class, and you have time to spare, break out a book and do a little of the reading for Wednesday’s history class. This doesn’t mean that you should study like crazy twenty-four hours a day. Don’t stay up until 2 A.M. Sunday night trying to finish the entire week’s load. But on days where you happen to be ahead of schedule, and you have already put aside time to work on a certain class, take advantage of this fortuitous situation to get ahead. Once you get used to working a little bit every day, you’ll be surprised by how often this situation might arise.
Straight-A students use this strategy whenever the opportunity presents itself, since getting ahead on class work frees up time to focus on big projects like paper writing or test preparation. It may seem superstitious, but easy weeks never seem to come in pairs. They’re like the calm before a storm: If you find yourself with time to spare, start getting ahead on your obligations, as a hurricane of deadlines is probably lurking just over the horizon.
Don’t Read Everything
“Doing all of your reading in college is a luxury most of us can’t afford—especially if you’re involved in extracurriculars,” explains Tyler, a straight-A student from Duke. “It’s important to triage your assignments: What do you need to read? What do you need to skim? And what can you skip entirely?” Lee from Columbia puts it as follows: “Reading can get overwhelming, and very few people I know do it all—that could drive a man insane!” And Chris, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, states his advice simply: “Don’t read everything on the syllabus, of course.”
These students all emphasize the same important point: It’s impossible to read every single thing assigned to you in every class. Sometimes you are simply given more pages to cover than you have hours in the day to complete. Therefore, it will help you to remember the following: Don’t do all of your reading. Colleges should mount this slogan on big bronze plaques and hang them up in every dorm room on campus—if every college freshman knew this secret, it would probably prevent a lot of unnecessary panic attacks.
The hard part, of course, is deciding what reading is important and what can be skipped. A lot of this decision-making ability comes from practice—the more college classes you take, the better you will become at identifying the exact level of importance of every assignment. There are, however, some general tips that can help you pick up this talent sooner rather than later. The techniques that follow are used by straight-A students to systematically identify which readings to spend time on and which to ignore.
For example, in most college courses there are one or two sources that show up on the reading list for almost every lecture. We will call these favored sources—they’re usually a textbook or a course reader, and they provide the basic structure for the course by outlining key facts and arguments in a condensed form. Always read the assignments from favored sources.
Professors usually augment these favored sources with a variety of supplemental readings that provide context or analyze certain arguments and events in more detail. These supplemental readings are often academic papers, transcripts of speeches, or chapters from books—and they are typically fascinating. But they are also typically expendable, and you should not plan on reading them all. Instead, if your time is limited during a particular week, then your strategy should be to select only the most important supplemental readings for review.
Of course, college is about learning, and if you have time to get through all of the assigned reading, then you definitely should. Your professor selected all of these readings because he or she felt they were important for your complete understanding of the given topic, and the more you read, the smarter you become. But as Tyler stated earlier, reading everything assigned is a “luxury” that you can’t always afford.
So how do you decide which supplemental readings to review, which to skim, and which to skip? Straight-A students follow this simple hierarchy:
Readings that make an argument are more important than
readings that describe an event or person, which are more important than
readings that only provide context (i.e., speech transcripts, press clippings).
Assignments at the top of this hierarchy require at least enough attention to allow you to identify the argument being made. They don’t have to be read as carefully as a favored source, but you should spend enough time with them to gain a good understanding of their theses. Assignments in the middle of the hierarchy merit skimming, since they introduce facts that can clarify relevant arguments. A quick pass through should highlight enough of these facts to be useful, and you certainly don’t need to carefully review every detail. Assignments at the bottom can usually be skipped, since professors will discuss what’s important about them during class. Make sure, therefore, that you bring these readings to class and take careful notes.
Now let’s look at a couple of sample entries from real college syllabi to illustrate how to apply this strategy in practice.
Example #1
The following entry comes from the syllabus of a history course titled The Emergence of Modern America.
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Class #20: Vietnam
Reading:
Maier, Pauline, et al. (2003) Inventing America. New York: Norton, 952–957, 968–971.
Johnson, Lyndon B. (1992) “Speech at Johns Hopkins University,” in George Katsiaficas, ed., Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views of the War. Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 200–205. [electronic reserve]
O’Brien, Tim. (1998) “On the Rainy River,” in The Things They Carried. New York: Random House, 39–61.
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Let’s assume that your schedule is swamped when you come across this assignment listing. What should you do? First, note that readings from Inventing America (a textbook) show up for almost every lecture in this syllabus, so this is clearly a favored source. Following our rule from above, you should definitely read the pages assigned from this textbook. The two other assignments look like supplemental readings, so let’s apply our importance hierarchy to figure out how much attention to devote to each.
The Lyndon Johnson speech looks like a source of context, the lowest rung on our importance hierarchy. Your best bet in this case is to print out a copy and bring it with you to class. This way, if the professor makes some important points regarding Johnson’s rhetoric, you can follow along and make notes on the pages. But don’t bother giving it more than a quick skim in advance.
The Tim O’Brien excer
pt comes from a great book. It’s a semifictionalized account of the draft during the Vietnam era, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Again, if you had the time, it would definitely be worth doing a careful reading of this excerpt, since it’s likely to be the most engaging and colorful. But if you happen to be overloaded at this point, you need to apply the importance hierarchy. Because this is a description of an event, it’s only on the second rung. Therefore, these twenty-two pages require a quick ten- to twenty-minute skim at best. As always, however, bring the book to class. If the professor mentions specific points relating to the book, you want to be able to follow along.
It should be noted that fiction is tricky. In this case, the Tim O’Brien book was a fictional account of a historical moment, and it’s assigned in a history course concerned mainly with the cultural construction of modern America. In this context, the book is providing background to the discussion, not presenting arguments, and thus it falls clearly onto the second rung of our importance hierarchy. This is not, however, always true with fiction. Novels can also be used as vehicles for powerful cultural statements or explorations into why certain events transpired. In these cases, the fiction becomes a favored source, or, at the very least, it moves to the top of our supplemental hierarchy. For example, in a political science course dealing with totalitarianism in the twentieth century, George Orwell’s 1984 is not a source of background, nor does it simply contextualize a historical moment; it instead presents an important argument on the subject. Keep this in mind when selecting your reading. Fiction should not, by any means, be automatically discounted. And if you are in an English class that focuses only on fiction, then obviously fiction readings are your favored sources. As Christine from Harvard explains, in these instances, “you defeat the entire point of the class if you read summaries or skim…you just have to do the reading.”