1.1 – Introduction & How to Take Notes (9 min video)

Transcript

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Welcome to our study of antiquity, which will cover this coming school year. To kind of jumpstart our thinking this week and what kind of class it’s going to be, I’m gonna take some time for orientation, take some time to talk about how to do this class as well, or maybe especially what this class actually is and really what it is we’re after. I think it might be helpful to start out with why I love history. So I’m actually gonna give you a quote by John Ruskin, a great Victorian writer. He said this, observing kind of the normal village life he saw around him and what kind of buildings were there. He said, “A building of the eighth or 10th century “stands ruinous in an open street.” So just imagine that. Imagine a typical English village in the 1800s. You have this ancient medieval building that’s standing in ruins in an open street. He says, “The children play around it. “No one wonders at it or thinks of it as separate “and of another time. “We feel the ancient world to be a real thing “and one with the new. “Antiquity is no dream. “It’s rather the children playing about the old stones “or the dream. “But all is continuous. “The words from generation to generation, “they become understandable here.” In other words, there’s something remarkable when you come across an old structure, especially one that that’s old, which you have to leave our country to go and find. But when you come across these kinds of old structures, these old places, whether it be perhaps an old stone wall in the woods or an old cemetery that people have forgotten about, or an old house somewhere along a country drive, when you come across these things, they should give you a sense of place, but also a sense of time.

they really should give you a sense of story. The fact that people were once here, the fact that people with all of their passions, with all of their relationships, their hopes, their fears, their joys, their regrets, their falls, and their redemptions, they were once here and they lived out their lives here, meaning stories happened here.

I think it’s that very idea, the fact that there are stories wherever we go, that I have always loved when it comes to history. When we realize that these stories are around us, it gives context to the places we actually live in, and we realize that the places we lived in are tied to a people, a people who influence us, a people who did something for good or for ill in the past, but who influence us, a people who, if they left something worth praising, say like the classics or the great artworks of the past.

When we look at those things, they give us a way of seeing, they give us a way of understanding things that goes beyond our own time and culture.

They allow us to transcend our own time and culture. G.K. Chesterton, one of my favorite authors, referred to this idea as the democracy of the dead. And he talks about how we have this virtue or this value of giving everyone a voice in government, and he said, “Well, what if you gave the people “who’ve even died a voice? “Not in the sense you somehow talk to the dead, “but in the sense that you respect “the people who’ve gone before us “because they had something worthwhile to offer.” In other words, when we look at the past, we look at the past classic works and the great heritage of the past, If we view them properly, and we view them at their best, we should be able to see our own prejudices and our own conceited nature that we have, often as modernists just thinking that our time and our place is often the best.

But we should also be able to see that things of the past are worthy of praise, they’re worthy of imitation, and at their best, they can teach us that we’re not alone in our experiences. That the things we experience, the things we hope for, So the things we go through, these are things that people throughout time have actually experienced.

That’s why the study of history, which is included in the study of what we call the humanities, it’s often been said that the humanities teach us what it means to be human. That’s what I love about history. That’s what I love about teaching the great books. That’s what I love about classic literature, poetry, artwork, and music. Now, we’ll unpack more of kind of why we do what we do in future lectures for this week. And you’ll see that there’s actually going to be five lectures for each of our lessons that we take a look at this year. But one of the primary things you’re going to be able to do for this class is to be able to take good notes. So right now, we’re going to take notes on how to take good notes. That may sound a little funny, but hey, you need to learn how to do it if you don’t have experience already. If you do have experience, excellent. You can hopefully kind of increase your skill there. But one thing to keep in mind when you’re taking notes is number one, you’re not gonna try to write down every single word that’s there. That’s gonna be an impossibility, at least for most people. What you really need to get down is what’s the main point? So in fact, if you wanna put down a note, you can say number one, record the main point, or record the main idea. This is the question you should always be asking, like, why is he talking about all these details? Like, what’s the point going on here? That’s what you want to capture. Number two, it’s often helpful to make an outline of some kind. And you can maybe have a parent or have a teacher show you some of the ways you can make outlines and things like that.

But if you make an outline that has kind of basic titles for different sections, you just want to make sure you flesh it out.

You add some of the details. you add some of the stories, you add maybe some minor points that we’ve talked about in our classes. I also recommend if possible that when you’re making your outline, you leave in spaces, you maybe indent lines, so that it almost looks like stair steps in terms of how your words are on the page instead of one gigantic block of text ’cause that gets a little bit hard to look at later on. I have some students even who love to use different colors of pen or pencil or markers even as they write their notes, their notes become almost like works of art.

If that’s you, awesome. Third, I would encourage you when you’re taking notes that you follow my pace. Look for what I emphasize. So if I kind of slow down for something, if I repeat a certain idea, if I seem to kind of pause and talk about something for a long time, you should probably write down something about that.

That’s gonna be important. And by important, I don’t mean important for the test. That’s really not the whole purpose of that. I mean important for remembering a certain time or a certain feature of history and why it matters ultimately. Fourth, it is a history class, so you do need to do things like record key people, record key events and dates, key places, key ideas.

You need to actually know the nuts and the bolts, the grammar of history, the basic facts, ’cause you can’t tell the story without the basic facts. Fifth, when it comes to stories themselves, I recommend that when you’re writing down or trying to record parts of a longer story, that instead of trying to write the whole story down, you just record major parts of it.

You record major characters and things that happened. And so that way, you’re not trying to get down every single thing. And this would also be the same for quotes. So when we come to a quote, it may be a really short quote, you can write down the whole thing. Excellent, of course, this is a video, you can also pause it and take time to write down every word if you want. But often quotes are quite long and quite laborious to actually write down every detail of them. So it might be helpful to just write down who said the quote and then write down the main idea of the quote. And you’ll find that I often explain what the quote is all about. Finally, you should be prepared to write most of the time while you’re watching these videos. You can, of course, pause and take breaks, something that my live classroom students probably wish they could do, but the point is this, prepare to write the whole time.

You really should be writing the entire time, recording as much as you can, not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of knowing these stories, so they begin to shape you and change you.

Anyway, we’ll talk about why we do this whole thing hold school in the next lecture.