For both the Sustainable Energy class I’m taking and my lasers research project, I have been doing most of my learning through resources like articles, videos, and podcasts. At other points in time, I didn’t take many notes on resources like these, usually trusting my memory to give me a good enough understanding. When doing a research project, I made sure to take notes on things that I needed to cite, but I found that when I actually sat down to write the paper I remembered what I read well enough to get through upwards of 6 pages of writing before I needed to check my notes. With podcasts and most short videos, I never took any notes, and even when I did they were often surface level and mostly just to guide a train of though. However, since I started working with the 10th graders, I’ve noticed that my memory, while still able to recall information, works in a way that I am able to clearly understand but that those I am trying to explain a concept to cannot. As a result, I have started to take notes on all resources I’ve used this trimester, and do so more thoroughly on those I would already have taken notes on. The first picture is of notes I took for a short reading from the Sustainable Energy class. I made sure to note important definitions from the reading, and break further notes into specific sections that can be identified more easily than they would if it was just a solid block of bullet points. The second image is my notecard on carbon dioxide lasers. I have started to take much more thorough research notes than I used to. I think that these changes have happened because even though I’m not teaching this specific material, I feel responsible for conveying what I know. I’ve seen that my memory doesn’t do that well enough, so I’ve started to use note taking to compensate.