Taking Notes... As if this week wasn't busy enough, I've just received back the student questionnaires for my second-year module The Physics of Fields and Flows (which includes some theoretical physics techniques, such as vector calculus and Fourier methods, together with applications to fluid flow, electromagnetism and a few other things). I've only just taken up this module this year and was planning to prepare it over the summer, but circumstances rather intervened and I've had to put together more-or-less on the fly. I was, therefore, not inconsiderably apprehensive about the reaction I'd get from the students. Fortunately most of the comments were fairly positive, although there were some very useful constructive criticisms, which I'll definitely take into account for the rest of the term. However, one recurring comment was that I write too fast on the whiteboard. In fact I go far more slowly than the lecturers I had at University. That brings me back to an old post I did some time ago about lecture notes . I won't repeat the entire content of my earlier discussion, but one of the main points I made in that was about how inefficient many students are at taking notes during lectures, so much so that the effort of copying things onto paper must surely prevent them absorbing the intellectual content of the lecture. I dealt with this problem when I was an undergraduate by learning to write very quickly without looking at the paper as I did so . That