The Bible, my students and taking notes

I've had the opportunity to teach at Southeast Missouri State as a part-time instructor over the last couple of years. I'm enjoying it enormously. One thing consistently befuddles this writer. Since confusion is my frequent companion, perhaps this is not out of the ordinary. I'm aware some teaching colleagues share my discombobulation. Here it is: students don't take notes in class.

A retired professor tells me he has all of his notes from every college class taken, which he typed up on a manual typewriter from his cursive notes. They sit in file folders in his office, available for ready perusal, if the situation ever warranted. That kind of devotion is difficult to emulate, but I was a monster note taker in all my levels of formal education. If a teacher said it, I wrote it down. Even if he or she handed out the outline of a lecture, I still wrote down notes in my own hand. It made learning real to have that tactile sensation.

How different the generations are. In the classes I've taught so far, nearly every student came without pen or pencil, without tablet or notebook, without a laptop to keystroke notes into Microsoft Word. One small caveat to this dreary recitation: an international student used to bring a smartphone to take a picture of the PowerPoint slide that had next week's assignment on it. Just that slide. Nothing else. No doubt the makers of student notebooks have suffered greatly from this antipathy to note taking.

My bias is to put the best face on a situation whenever possible. Optimism is my default position unless forced into a less high-minded philosophical bent. Seeing through rose-colored glasses, therefore, the aversion to taking notes might indicate students can better get "the big picture" [whatever that is] of a lecture without being so narrowly focused on what the teacher is actually saying. They are more "in the moment," so to speak. The hands-free approach to being in class could also be attributed to superior memories among the young. However, this rationale is somewhat mitigated by a recent email. A student asked: "When is the final paper due? I can't find this information anywhere" I spoke the deadline aloud for at least six consecutive weeks and put it in multiple PowerPoint presentations.

It can be said with absolute certainty no one was taking contemporaneous notes when Jesus of Nazareth was preaching the Sermon on the Mount, the multi-chapter discourse forming the basis of what it means to have a life in God. Those who were present remembered it and held it in mind for 20 years or more before actually committing it to papyrus. The Holy Bible is, among other things, a collection of remembered stories that eventually made their way to a page. The argument could be advanced that people recalled the core of Jesus' message, but not his actual words spoken verbatim. The logic of that statement is hard to refute. Would we be better off to have an actual transcript of the Master's remarks on the Mount of Olives, in Gethsemane and at Calvary?

Perhaps, but this is a moot discussion. Corporately, we revere a book, the Bible, which relies on the memories of the writers. We are satisfied to the Bible's contents without having any access to notes taken in real time. We trust the Holy Spirit preserved in human minds the essence of what was necessary for the coming ages to know.

The Gospel writers didn't take notes. They remembered Jesus' words. I'm OK with that. Hey, I'm feeling better about my students already.

Dr. Jeff Long is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation, is a retired United Methodist pastor, and teaches religious studies at Southeast Missouri State University.