UZO

Lectures are a very important part of our learning is school. Most people would argue that it is not as important as the tutorials because at the tutorials, you get to discuss the lecture topic in more detail in small groups with a tutor. Meanwhile in lectures, the information is more condensed and mostly incomprehensible in a room filled with over a thousand people.

Really, there are ways to approach lectures, as we do not only gain knowledge to pass exams but also to keep us well informed on subject area and for it to be applicable in future.   The best ways to approach lectures are 1) sitting at the front of the lecture hall or close enough to the front to avoid any distraction from friends and peers when the lecture is going on. 2) Have a bottle of water to keep us alert – most lectures carry on for 2 hours and some lectures do not give breaks in-between. This can be very draining and we might get bored, so having a drink of water from time to time might help to keep you alert. 3) Taking notes – we aren’t computers so we need to take some points, important points, made by the lecturer down on a sheet of paper for future reference. Sometimes, note taking can be quite a task so I can suggest using recorders to record the lecture in case we want to refer back to it. I don’t think it is the best but at least it may help. I cannot exactly say what the best note taking style is, as people differ but I know that the least useful way is using the linear method because it makes it more difficult to read and understand in future. Notes should be understandable whenever we read them and they should be brief so that we do not have to summarise them again. Personally, any note that can be summarised is not a good note. Some people as myself, like to draw arrows and use “thinking bubbles”, I am not sure if that’s the right name.

Based on the lectures I have attended so far, I would say they were very self-explanatory. Some of the lecture slides were so easy that you didn’t even have to be at the lecture to understand them. Also, my lecturers gave breaks so it wasn’t so draining.

It is vital to attend lectures. Some people think they could use friend’s notes or the listen again but reading your friend’s notes isn’t as useful because they might not have taken down good notes and you may not understand their style of writing as well. Listen again is good but it might not be so audible. Hence, this can leave us clueless during the tutorials and pose problems of understand in future.