Most people view sitting in a class as a passive experience. They think of it like attending a (boring) movie. At least, with a movie, the director attempts to put some interesting story on the screen. They're paid millions to keep you interested in what's going on, and for the most part, they avoid making you think too much. Even when you have to think, it doesn't take that much effort.
However, lectures are different. You're expected to learn, which means the material is often complicated, and you may have to spend some time after class trying to master the material.
This set of notes is aimed at getting you to learn while you're sitting in class. How effective this is depends somewhat on you, and somewhat on the person giving the lecture.
In an ideal world, each lecture would be customized to each student. Those who understand material quickly would get a fast-paced lecture, and asked to figure things out in class. Those who take their time to learn might require more detailed explanations, and reminders. If you hear students complain that a teacher can't teach, it often says as much about the student as the teacher. Often, that student is unable to learn at the pace the teacher expects.
Unfortunately, customized lectures take too much time and resources, so a good lecturer often (or at least, should) aim at the middle of the class. This approach may bore the brighter students while leaving other students somewhat lost. However, it tries to appeal to most of the students.
As a student, however, you must realize learning is a two-way street. It's not merely the job of the teacher to teach you. You have to do your part. You have to try to learn. And, as long as you're attending lecture, you might as well make the most of learning from lecture. This is the goal of this set of notes.
If you follow any sports, especially team sports, the coach often yells at the player. The idea is to push the player to his or her potential. Without such "encouragement", players get a little complacent, and find it difficult to push themselves to excel all the time. Athletes work much closer to the optimum skill level than a student works to his/her level, because the coaches compel them to do so, and of course, because the athlete wants to perform well too.
Do you want to be a good student? Are you willing to push yourself as hard as athletes are pushed to be good athletes? Clearly, those are two different questions. Most students want to be good students. They want to maximize their learning. However, they often don't do that much to help themselves.
It's very much like dieting. Many people who go on a diet feel they have a problem with their weight. So, they diet. They want to solve the problem quickly. But after a while, this proves painful, and they stop dieting.
At least, with dieting, there is a concrete goal, and concrete steps one can take. With learning, it's not so easy to set goals, not to decide what steps to take.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a coach tell you to study and work, so that you wouldn't have to do it yourself? Yet, in reality, such yelling probably wouldn't work.
Think about it. When has a teacher yelled at you for failing to read the book? For failing to keep up with the exercises? And even if they yelled, you know there are no real consequences. If someone tells you to go home and read your notes, will you really read them? Most people are creatures of habit. They don't really want to do work unless forced to, and even then, they only do the work if they see a definite penalty for not doing it (and even then, some students procrastinate).
That's why you see students working hard on projects, but not working as hard on lecture material, until it comes exam time. There's no immediate penalty for not learning the lecture material right away. However, by waiting until exam time, it can be too late. There's too much material to absorb.
So this is where I'm going to help you by trying to make you a more effective student while you're in lecture. If you're taking a class from a halfway-decent lecturer, you should be able to learn a lot from the lecture, at least, more than you're learning right now.
First thing you have to do, no matter how painful it is, is to stay alert. There are professors who will put you to sleep, but you have to keep reminding yourself to stay alert. If you're not awake, you're not learning. This won't come easily, but with practice, you can be alert. If need be, put a note on your notebook "Stay Alert!".
The next step is to learn to be an active listener. The way most people learn new things is to learn their own explanation for how things work.
What does this mean?
Who do you think learns the most from a class? Is it the best student in the class? Perhaps they do. But it's often the teacher who learns the most, especially the first time they teach the material.
You might wonder why. After all, aren't they the teacher? Aren't they experts on the material? It's one thing to say you know the material well enough to use it. It's another to know enough to teach the material. When you teach, you have to come up with a coherent explanation that makes sense to yourself. And this explanation has to be simple enough that the students can also understand it, which means you have to have some idea what a student knows and what a student doesn't know.
By teaching something, you are organizing the thoughts in your own head, and then presenting that organized thought to a class. In the process, you are making that explanation much clearer to yourself, and thus learning it. In the process, you may also discover that certain things don't make any sense, even though you may have believed it, or you may realize your knowledge isn't as complete as it should be. So, you look this material up, and hope to fill in missing gaps. This is one way where teaching can help you learn.
As a student, you don't have this luxury of teaching as a way of learning the material, unless, perhaps you have done some tutoring. You'd probably feel silly lecturing to a mirror, and initially, you might not be any good at putting a coherent lecture together.
You can compromise though. As you're sitting in class, listening to the lecture, try to think about what you're hearing. Does it make sense to you? Could you explain what happened in lecture to someone who didn't go to class? This is why it's important that you learn to listen and not fall asleep. If you fall asleep, then forget about any hope of getting coherent information. This is why it's important to show up on time. Show up late, and again, you're puzzled at what's going on in class.
As you're trying to make sense of what you hearing, you're going to hear stuff that doesn't make sense. At that point, write that down. Make yourself think of a question you could ask that would help clarify things.
In order to ask questions, you have to know why you're confused. This can be very difficult to determine. Sometimes, it's a gap in knowledge. The teacher assume you've heard some phrase before, or know some facts, and you have no idea. At times, you have the wrong picture in your head. You think computers work one way, and what's being said doesn't make sense based on what you know.
The real part of active learning is to start making yourself aware of what's causing you to get confused. Make a note in your notebook that says "this confuses me". For a while, you may not know why it confuses you, but over time, you'll learn how to describe what confuses you better.
Ideally, when you listen to a lecture, you should be able to ask at least half a dozen questions before the end of a lecture. These questions could be clarification questions, or they may extend an idea. Generally, you prefer to ask clarification questions. Sometimes it's as simple as "Professor, this is what I think you're saying---is that true or not?". Sometimes it's some strange symbol or strange term, and you can ask "What do you mean when you say farblegook?".
Usually, I think it's useful to stop about 10 seconds before asking a question. Make sure you try to come up with an answer. But if you can't then ask. The most common problem students have is asking questions.
Over time, I've figured out why students don't ask questions. In order to ask questions, you can't be totally lost. If you're totally lost, then it's too hard to ask questions because you don't even know what's going on. Imagine going to some graduate course in differential geometry. There are so many assumptions about your background that may not apply to you, that you could never ask a coherent questin.
In order to ask a question, you need to recognize that you understand something one way, but you're hearing something another way. Or something is being said, but you don't see all the details in your head. For example, someone may be telling you how to put some mechanical object together, but they skipped a few steps, so you don't see how they managed to get from step A to step B.
Initially, it's difficult to ask questions, so you need to practice over the course of a semester. With enough semesters, you can learn to ask good questions, that help you, and help your fellow students.
This is what I call active learning. It's all about trying to explain the concepts in the class to yourself, and using questions to the teacher to help clarify. By always pondering what question you can ask, you start to listen more carefully, with the intent to learn.
Your model of the world is likely to be both incomplete and incorrect. So, as you listen to lecture, you are trying to fill in missing gaps, and correct mistaken views of the world.
To make lectures more effective, you need to first learn to listen. As you learn to listen, you need to start making notes in your notebook, indicating where the lecturer said something that did not make sense to you. Put a bunch of question marks there such as ???. If you can actually write down a real question, do that instead (e.g. "But why isn't that number 128 instead of 127?").
Either ask a question in class or after class.
Realize that this process is going to be slow. If you've never asked questions before in class, then you've had little practice. It will not be easy to think of questions or even to stay alert.
However, with practice, you should learn to get a lot more out of class, all through the magic of active learning!