Editing Blog/2025-01-15/Spatial-Textual Memory (section)

== Place in the Class ==

One strange related anecdote is that I've only taken notes during lectures once in class: in Algebraic Geometry, my worst class ever. For most lectures I can usually recall all sorts of other related information that cues me into a memory. Often this is how much of the blackboard is full, where the lecturer was standing next to the board or in which orientation, and sometimes the position in the textbook where I next encountered a concept first discussed. Within the first couple of classes, we encountered [[wikipedia:Hilbert's Nullstellensatz|Hilbert's Nullstellensatz]] which I distinctly recall as on the top of the page in Hartshorne's ''Algebraic Geometry''<ref name=hartshorne/>. On the third class or so, taken by the theory that note-taking improves memory and so on, I applied myself to rigorously taking notes.

Unused to writing down things while paying attention, I found myself falling behind in class. But the research showed that note-taking was good, so I persisted. The result was disastrous: my worst grade in any class since middle-school and with the last surviving memory of the class being the position of the Nullstellensatz in the textbook. This was also a lesson in abandoning techniques once they start failing you, since I committed to it far too long, and then persisted in it because if I abandoned the technique then it just meant I was bad at Algebraic Geometry: which might well be the case.

I have since persisted in my original method of class attendance: 100% attention in class with zero note-taking except to write down ideas that follow that I want to explore. This worked well for the classes that I took after and in the Computer Science degree at North Carolina State University that I had to acquire to move to the US, which was admittedly far less intense<ref name=msc/> than the Mathematics post-graduate degree at IIT Madras.

All in all, it strikes me that if most people use place-in-the-page as an index like I do, then they probably also use place-in-the-class like I do. The notes, in the end, were never as useful as self-study post-hoc and notes I created from the textbook rather than the lecture. I haven't yet found anything in pedagogy about this zero notes approach, though some people online do mention it as an aside in other contexts.