Being LAZY can only get you so far..

Up to this year, my note taking skills had not been up to par. There is one simple reason for this. Laziness. Normally what I would end up doing, is writing down only half the notes I saw up on the board in class, thinking that a friend would help me fill them in later.

However, this would rarely happen.

Therefore, my tests weren’t always that successful...but then again, this didn’t come as a shock to me. I was always angry that my other friends didn’t have to study as much as I did to do well. That was very discouraging to me, and made me not try as hard as I should have.

This week I used the topic outline for my Health and Wellness test. This class only uses powerpoints as our source of information. Although I left out some much needed notes from my powerpoint in my topic outline…oops :[ ..this structure worked extremely well for me. I was able to rewrite my notes, and the powerpoints by dividing my information into topics. Then after writing the date of the powerpoint which corresponded to each subject, I further added bullet notes of information I should know. As I numbered bullet point, it represented the separate slides they were on. Splitting up the topics like this made it easier for me to refer back to the powerpoints and it gave me a visual of when I learned the information. Next time, I will include ALL of the information on the powerpoints and not assume what will be on the test and what wont, because overall this strategy worked very well for me in terms of memorizing the information.

For my Economics class I started to make a source outline. However, this is not a strategy that I found affective for me. Although I know I will have to finish it for my Experiment Project, in Economics, we only have two sources that we can use to study for the midterm; notes, and two old midterm tests. Therefore, writing out page numbers only wasn’t that helpful because there weren’t multiple sources which would make it confusing for me when gathering all of my information.

Also within each chapter there are MULTIPLE sections. Therefore, I decided to also use the topic outline for this class as well. As I started dividing my notes by topic, it felt like the perfect opportunity to go through the chapter and start re writing information (also questions from the "Objectives" in the back of the book.)

I wrote down each section next to the topic, so I knew what page each topic started on. I actually started filling in the topic outline, therefore turning it into a very neatly written study guide as well.

Something I learned this week is to make sure that I organize my notes in way that is clear to ME, while including ALL of the notes I take, or have available to me. After all, at the end of the day, being lazy can only get you so far.