Preparing for ten days of zero contact with Corey
I am so ready for fall, guys. I want that crisp, cool fall air, and the leaves blowing around on the breezes. I'm tired of being hot all the time. And I'm really tired of my car breaking down (four times now, in the past week) and the air conditioning not working. I want sweaters, boots and scarves. That's why I'm listening to Vince Guaraldi. He wrote all the Peanuts music, and I listen to him all autumn and winter. I'm breaking out the Trio so that cooler weather better be on the way!
I'm pretty proud, though, y'all. Three weeks into school and I'm still organized! I've started procrastinating a little, but I finished a whole book for Tuesday yesterday and I'm pretty happy with that. I've been doing something different this semester as far as my notes are concerned, too.
In previous years, I'd take notes on loose leaf paper, stuff it in that first flap-sleeve thing in the front of my binder, and then forget about it. Then, when the test came around and I desperately needed all my notes to cram (usually the morning of) I had to frantically search through a two-inch-thick stack of papers to find the notes for the right class, then spend ten or fifteen minutes attempting to put them in chronological order so I could keep all the info organized in my brain. (There are, like, special codes for remembering things in my mind. Chronological order seems to be one of them.) This wasted at least half an hour of my early-morning cram time, and we all know how important that time is.
This semester I'm doing things differently. I have one two-inch binder with five dividers. I have two spiral bound notebooks in which I take notes. I title each page with the class name and the date so I never have to worry about "which class was this?" and "what day did we talk about that?" I don't worry about organizing it during the day because typically, professors start talking as soon as I sit down and I don't want to waste time between classes when I'm normally booking it to my next class. I don't even think about which notebook I'm using. I just keep both for the heck of it. Any loose paper that's handed back - tests or quizzes or papers - I put in that inside flap-sleeve in the binder.
That sounds like a modified version of my past rifling and huge pile of papers, but here's the catch. I don't leave it like that. First thing I do when I come home at the end of the evening is sit down with my notebooks and binder and tear out all the notes I've taken. This is a great time to go over what I wrote down, think back to the lecture or discussion, and do a quick run-through of the class. That means less study-time later cause I've already gone over it once. It's good to do this the day of the class while it's still fresh in your brain.
Remember all those papers that were handed back? I take those out and go over them, too. If it's a test or quiz, I look at what I got wrong and the professor's comments. If it's a paper that needs revision, I do the same thing and may even make a few cursory notes to myself for later. Then, I hole-punch them and put them in my binder in their respective dividers along with all the notes I tore out of the notebooks that day.
It sounds kind of time-consuming, but so far it's really helped me. I've already remembered much more from previous lectures than I have in the past, which gives me hope for my coming exams.
Do you have any systems for keeping your notes organized? I'll take all the help I can get!
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