Class Session Summary Assignment

We often think of our notes for class as ours alone. In this assignment, you will learn how to take your notes and turn them into a summary that is accessible and useful to all of us. Ideally, class notes should be a record of the collective experience of what we learn in the classroom.

To that end, this assignment asks you to create a set of notes for one assigned class session that will be useful not only to you but also to your classmates. Your job is to take careful notes during class, being especially attentive to important concepts or themes, passages from the text that we cover, and key discussion questions. You will then organize your notes into a post that summarizes what happened in class, what important ideas and questions were covered, and what the general discussion points were. You will also transcribe a couple of key passages from that day's text, offering some comments about why we found those passages important to the day's discussion. Make sure to include page numbers for the passages you reference.

This post should not simply transcribe what appears on the board or the projector, nor should it reflect a straight transcription of what you wrote down in your notebook. Rather, your job is to figure out what the point of this class period seemed to be. What were we trying to learn? What strategies did we use to do that learning? What knowledge did we come away with?

I should warn you: it is easy to do this assignment badly. Imposing order on the chaos of your notes requires attention and careful thinking about the discussion and the readings. If done well, these summaries should help you articulate how the class period was designed to get you to learn something about the literature you're reading and, at the same time, build a treasure trove of material to mine for studying for the exams. A larger goal here is that you also learn how to be a better note-taker and how to learn from the notes you take.

In your post, you can organize the notes for the day however you like, keeping in mind how best to present them to your audience (your classmates). Your posts will be evaluated according to thoroughness (did you cover everything?), helpfulness (are they easy to understand?), and accuracy (did you accurately represent the important passages, concepts, and ideas for the day?) Each post should contain a 300-word summary and at least two key passages with explanations of why they were important to the day's discussion.

Label your post with the Class Notes tag. Class Session Summaries are due by 8 pm the day following the class period (so on Wednesday and Friday nights).