Daily writing prompt
Describe something you learned in high school.
When I was in elementary school, our teacher would write all their notes on the blackboard and you had to write them down in your notebook. It was long, it was tedious and it didn’t guarantee that you would have all the notes down if you weren’t fast enough. Honestly, looking back, it was a poor system and I don’t think really taught us anything. I know they say that writing things down can help you learn them better but it’s hard when you’re just focused on getting them down before the teacher erased them to add more notes.
Thankfully I did well in school and was a good student but I could see how that could set others up for failure.
I then entered high school and everything was different. Our teachers wanted to prepare us for college and that meant teaching us how to take our own notes. Very few teachers wrote notes on the board with the exception of math and science, for obvious reasons. For the rest, they talked and we wrote.
So I learned how to take notes. I also learned how to listen and to retain as much information as I could. My notes often included phrases rather than full sentences because that phrase would trigger me to remember the full information. It really helped.
I graduated high school and went onto college. I found I was prepared for the workload and my note taking skills really helped. There was one class I took where everyone would crowd around my notebook before exams because they knew I took notes in class and I took good notes. It was a source of pride and amusement for me.
Fast-forward to my current job. When I was hired, I was told I would also have to back up the Senior Executive Assistant. For the most part, that meant answering the phones and doing some tasks for the CEO when the EA was out. One day, though, it meant that I needed to take minutes when my CEO was on a meeting via phone. I sat in her office and wrote my notes then typed them up following a format my boss sent me. I sent the minutes off for review and they realized I was really good at taking minutes.
Really, really good.
I don’t have to always take minutes but they know I can do it well. My boss also knows I retain a lot of information, which can be helpful when we have conversations. My ability to take notes and retain information is just a really good skill to have.
And it all goes back to high school.