What's Wrong with a Hand-out?

Oops! Sorry, that just burst out of me uncontrollably after months of frantically suppressing it for fear of being seen as ignorant, disrespectful to my contemporaries, or vastly technologically inept.

But I am none of these things.

(Can I say before I begin that I am really grateful for the lecturers' teaching and I have a lot of respect for them all. I don't want this blog to be misconstrued as an attack.)

I have been feeling increasingly disorientated on the course as the year has progressed. Mainly because my life has been completely revolutionised by journalism (which is a good thing).

It has literally taken over my thoughts, it is the motivation behind many of my actions, and it underlies my interpretation of everything I read, watch, or listen to.

Lurking beneath this new pro-active, excited, career-driven buzz, though, is an undercurrent of panic.

I am finding the ferocious onslaught of journalism on my life in some ways extremely difficult to adapt to, which I suppose is expected. But do I really need to grapple with certain technological advances to add to the mix?

What IS wrong with a handout? If I am having trouble fathoming what on earth the law textbook is trying to tell me (my faith in it as a journalistic tool is somewhat impaired by its ironic persistence in using 100 words where three will do)the last thing I want to do is wait for the lecture to be blogged a week later.

And to be honest - please no one take offence at this - I find many of the blogged lectures very muddled and super-basic and overall difficult to understand. We were told not to worry about trying to write down everything said in lectures because they would be blogged. But I need more detail!

A piece of paper. Bullet points stating the main points of the lecture with brief notes following each point outlining what was elaborated on. That's all I'm asking for. I can put it in my folder next to my scribbled lecture notes. I can refer back to it when I'm studying without having to log onto the computer. I can make notes down the side. I can tick off the sections I have understood or revised. It is a physical entity that can be filed in organised order with my notes, and THAT is what complements the lecture for me. The online lectures complement the handouts.

To revise for law and public affairs (as well as having read McNae's obviously) I trawled through the course message board trying to find the posted lecture notes, and then trawled through the law site trying to make notes from that. A simple hand-out every week to put it all into order in my head would have made this task so much easier when it came to revising.

It helps compartmentalise the (excellent) lectures in my head before I start taking notes once the lesson has begun. I know then, if the class digresses or the we go a bit off course, what bits I need to be listening out for and making notes on.

So please, before making us run, let us walk. We have already crawled by managing not to have nervous breakdowns at the huge impact this whole new lifestyle has had on our lives, which I don't think anyone anticipated. I would love to run, but I need a bit of extra help first.