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Class notes a cover for all sorts of foolery
By Adam Petty
Features Editor
Calvin students have a reputation for being studious, diligent and hard-working. It does a prof’s heart good to look out on a classroom full of students and see them all committing the class lecture to their notebooks. But are their notes really so attentive? Do they really find the fluctuating wheat prices of the 19th century Russian economy to be that fascinating? Maybe so, but if they aren’t all that interested in the class material, why would they be writing in their notebooks so carefully and attentively?
It’s true confession time. Not everything scribbled down in the classroom has to do with your education. There are simply times when it is more important to depict the bravery of the dwarves in their battle against Smaug the dragon, or to honor the memory of that jelly doughnut you had for breakfast with a heartfelt illustration.
Doodling in the margins of one’s notebooks is an age-old practice, one that likely goes back to the first modern universities. One can just imagine John Calvin sitting in his theology class, looking for all the world like a good student, when he was actually busy drawing satirical caricatures of Ulrich Zwingli.
However, just because notebook doodles are done instead of paying attention in class doesn’t mean that they’re without their educational value. Often they serve as intuitive illustrations of some of the more technical aspects of a certain theory. For example, one of the illustrations shown here is from a notebook used for a physics class. Amongst the equations and formulas is a note that simply reads, “Newton doesn’t like Descartes—thinks he’s a wanker.” A truly succinct and elegant summary of a concept which may take a professor weeks of deliberate teaching to illustrate.
Another shown here depicts an important new insight into the Old Testament practice of ritual sacrifice. While a figure bows before an altar, upon which a burning sacrifice has been laid, God is depicted in the heavens above, smacking his lips and saying, “Mmm! Goat!” Such knowledge pertaining to the culinary tastes of our Heavenly Father cannot help but add to our understanding of the workings of God as depicted in the ancient texts.
But aside from the purely educational value of such doodling, there are also immensely rewarding anthropological discoveries to be made. Much like archaeologists who gain insight into the psychology of primitive man through the paintings and drawings made on the wall of his cave, future scientists and researchers will have access to the thoughts and ponderings of Calvin College students at the dawn of the twenty-first century. And what will they discover? That knights and swords are cool, that Strong Bad likes e-mail and that there’s no word for geek in Elvish.
In addition to doodles as items of historical and social significance, they also offer an insight into the cultural development of college students. What were their beliefs, their patterns for worship, their eternal ideals? Judging by the frequency with which brooding figures in hooded robes appear, one can reasonably conclude that Calvin students belong to some sort of atavistic, proto-Celtic nature cult. Either that, or some people are too avid fans of Dungeons and Dragons for their own good.
Some people may disparage the practice of doodling in notebook margins, seeing as being tangential and willfully ignorant of the larger issues being discussed in the classroom. However, such arguments miss the point of doodling, which is to make one’s education something of one’s own, with the material presented in the class remade into a narrative of personal significance to the student. The stories of history and thought are rearranged by the student’s own psyche, resulting in a unique mental and tactile landscape in which the wives of Henry VIII can stand peacefully beside Pinky and the Brain.
Perhaps in the future, students could be even graded on the overall quality of their notebook doodles throughout the semester, as a way of gauging the student’s particular style of learning. Not only would sketches of bears and butterflies in the margins of a bluebook be a way to give the tests a more personal touch, it would also bring a little warmth and happiness into the lives of the professors here.
So the next time you’re in class and find your attention drifting, just remember the following piece of tried-and-true advice: Melvil Dewey would be way cooler if he had bat ears and a cape.
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