I have various systems for taking notes in class. One thing I do is reserve the margins of my filler paper for items that are apart from the point of the course. They might be odd or funny quotes from the teacher or one of the students, things I recall because of something mentioned in the lecture, or something funny that happened in the classroom. It's like how I write irrelevant things on baseball scorecards, e.g. whether the ceremonial first pitch was a strike, comments on the aim of the guy who tosses bags of peanuts, the price of beer, etc.
My academic adviser, who is far more optimistic about my potential than I am, has paved my way into a teaching assistant gig in a course I took some years ago when I was last in school. So today I have retrieved my notes and started to go over them, presuming that the professor will assume that I have learned what I was previously taught. I notice some particularly good marginalia from the course, some of which I thought I would share:
On accomplishment: "They might have done it wrongly, but they did it."
Mmm...spiritual horse ["Mmm" idiom is via Homer Simpson]
Meet the nominalist twins
Set bogon filter to high
Signal to noise ratio
Amo, amis, amit
Boethius: was exaggerating
The unseemliness of shrill violins
'Pickin' Up Change' is not a dance in classical musical proportion
Acrimonious debate on the Proslogion
The modern suffocating with theoretical possibility
Party foul: using starvation as an example on Ash Wednesday
Anastasius the librarian
"This morning I was reading Ecclesiastes..."
On objects: "That which throws itself against you."
The problem of inappropriate delight
Mmm...apex mentis
The deist football
On Cherry Garcia: "It is necessary to finish the whole pint and Pelagianism is made real"
"If you don't believe in the power of concupiscence, go get hooked on heroin and then come talk to me."
"I would rather starve than pay someone $11 to change euros."
S[acred] S[cripture]: the poor man's Aristotle
donkeys who give homilies and play the zither
2 comments:
I'm one of the dopes who'll sit in class and note nearly word-for-word. I hate throwing things away, which works out great for me, because my instructors offered pearls of wisdom with every lecture. Such as:
"Liability. When managing factories that produce products with nuts, write warnings on all product packages. Otherwise we'll have dead people running around everywhere, and that is no good."
This was from managerial accounting.
Did you know that Fermat's last theorem is also a work of marginalia? Written in 1637 and not solved for 358 years :Fermat wrote"I have discovered a truly marvelous proof that it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second into two like powers. This margin is too narrow to contain it."
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