Dear lecturers, stop moving onto the next slide before I’ve finished my notes

We’ve all been there, the 9am lecture routine. Half asleep, you drag yourself into the lecture theatre, you sit near the back, ready for a quick exit. You open up your laptop screen, or notebook, and hide behind it so the lecturer asks you no questions and then you prepare to just write down everything on the powerpoint and then read through it later to figure out what they were actually talking about.

But that’s not how it plans out, is it? Your lecture finishes at 10, which also happens to be when your lecturer has a coffee date. She’s rushing through her slides at lightning speed in order to finish at 9.45am and get to Starbucks.

Look love, I know that neither of us want to be here, but at least let me finish writing down that really useful quote before you move onto the next slide.

I’m tired of feeling as though I’m in a race to get my notes down before you get onto your next point. I write my notes  on my mac, and I can touch-type, yet I still struggle. I can’t even begin to imagine how awful it is for those who choose to write their notes with pen and paper. I don’t listen in lectures, I go to write down what’s on the powerpoint and then quote it in my essays, doesn’t everyone do that?

Slow. Down.

I always get halfway through writing down a really valuable quote that actually makes sense of the module I’m studying, when the lecturer decides to skip forward to something completely irrelevant and tell us about how his fish died. Who cares?! My notes are littered with half finished quotes and sentences from lecturers moving onto something useless. These scraps of information are my only way of remembering what on earth is going on in lectures. It’s in one ear out the other at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning.

What am I supposed to do? Stick in an essay “Freud says ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when…..’ sorry, I don’t know what the end of the sentence is”?

Please, for the love of god, give me time to write my notes before you move on. Those few extra seconds before you move onto the next slide can make the difference between if I pass or fail my module.