09.14.05
Fall, 2005 - Historian’s Craft
The assignment: read John Arnold’s book History: A Short Introduction and take notes as if I were going to have to write a report or something at some point without having the book available.
Thoughts: very interesting, I learned some new techniques for taking notes and the discussion in the class forums was fascinating, as they all are. Mostly, I took notes the way I usually do for a paper and turned them in. I got to colour code my comments to differentiate them from direct quotes and paraphrases.
The Grade: Good. At first, my heart sank a little bit when I saw the number but when I saw the letter grade and the comments, I felt better. Mostly, I lost ground on the “mechanics” of taking notes. I learned to include the chapter title with the heading (I had just used the chapter #), write the page # after even the paraphrases and perhaps add some organization (like bullet points) so as not to repeat myself. Overall, I’m pleased with the encouragement I received.
The Praise: I have a good grasp of Arnold’s concepts and provided good insight. (This was especially nice to hear while I was going through my crisis of faith.)
The Quibble: Not so much a quibble as a stylistic difference. I will address this in email, not so much as fishing for more points, because that isn’t what this is about but as an explanation of my background and why I chose the particular “shorthand” phrases in the section that had to do with perceiving patterns and themes in history.
I used “pattern matching” with no other words. Because of my background working in high tech and with programmers for so long (not to mention my specatacular failure in a Perl class), this phrase means what it looks like, a search for patterns. And I would remember what that meant in 3 months time.
As I said, it’s a stylistic thing and Dr. N. wants to make sure that the notes we take will help keep the material fresh when we need it, whether a week or 3 months from the date of taking notes. I don’t disagree with any of her critique, or my grade.