At the semester-end party, I jokingly suggested that if students were going to throw away their Land and Bible class notes that they not put them in the donate bins where I might find them and feel bad. The students’ audible reaction was that no one would ever throw away those notes. But I’ve seen it in the past and it happened again yesterday. I skimmed through the notes and was impressed – the handwritten notes in the margins and on the backs of the printed notes were quite detailed and extensive. They were also personal, including random quotes (“Where are my wadis?”, “There should be a fear of Todd”). Which makes me think that during the semester they took the notes because they cared, and not only to pass the test. But when it came to the end, they decided they weren’t worth keeping. And not only for that class, but for all of their classes. Now it’s not true that throwing all of your notes away is the same as deleting the semester from your mind. There are memories. But those fade. I admit that I have many classes in which I took notes that I have not looked at since. But I didn’t throw them away. There’s something at least symbolic about them that keeps me from doing so. That and the recognition that once gone, always gone. And there’s always the “just in case.”<\/p>\n
Like many teachers, I suppose, I think my classes are the most important. Whereas a course in chemistry or economics may or may not have relevance to an individual throughout his\/her life, a course on the geography of the Bible seems like it would always be useful to anyone who reads the Bible. There are always other sources on the subject besides class notes, but an advantage of class notes is that they are organized in the way that you learned the subject. And they are personal. Taking notes is a lot of work. If I knew that I didn’t care or wouldn’t need them, I sure wouldn’t put out the effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the semester-end party, I jokingly suggested that if students were going to throw away their Land and Bible class notes that they not put them in the donate bins where I might find them and feel bad. The students’ audible reaction was that no one would ever throw away those notes. But I’ve seen\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}