How not to take notes

When I speak in class I often wonder what my students choose to write down.  Sometimes I worry that if I emphasize that one thing is NOT the same as another half of them will write “one thing = another” in their notes.  The other day I found the following student notes in class:

• Meeting with [Professor] in her office on Thursday, February 24th at 10:00am.
• She is actually talking about statistics and I have no idea what is happening…
• We drew some arrows
• Remember ice cream and murder rates

Those four lines were all that the student wrote down.  The second line sounds like a text while the third reinforces the idea that the student has no idea what is going on and the final line reminds me of Memento (remember Sammy Jenkis…).

Given that these notes indicated they were for a senior seminar I can only hope that the student in question has better note-taking abilities than he or she chose to utilize on this day.  The alternative, that this student has made it through nearly four years of college taking notes like these, is too embarrassing to think about as a college professor.