alt Hacker News> you don't learn from it
Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.
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quietbritishjim • today at 11:51 AM
Taking down the lesson/lecture does relatively little, you can do it on autopilot. If anything, it distracts from listening to the content. When I took computer science at university (mid naughties) we were given digital lecture notes anyway. (Mathematics lectures did have to be written down but there were no typed notes to start with so it was just out of necessity.) It's the exercises afterwards that are useful for learning. Or summarising notes in your words.
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Of course you learn more if you retype material than if you do nothing, but it's still a waste of time, comparatively speaking, because there are much better ways of engaging with the material like solving practice problems.
Having to spend 95% of the time taking notes of things that could be distributed in a PDF has only ever hindered me academically. It's mechanical and boring, my mind tunes out and I get nothing out of it.