This was originally written for a school assignment, and for the record I got 90% on it (9/10). I've made some minor edits so everyone understands and doesn't say, "well it's not like that were I live!!".

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Why should we copy down questions/notes?

Why should we have to? I can’t imagine that anyone in the world would actually want to copy down questions. But- we still do. Why? Because no one has seriously looked at this issue. You will find out though this short paper that copying down questions is both silly & useless.

Firstly, let’s being with what the problem actually is. Simple, but I will still explain it. So, teachers will usually have students copy down questions/notes and then have them do this. Ok, seems like it works. The main teacher point of view is that they can’t photocopy everything because it wastes paper. The main student point of view is that it’s very boring and some students can’t write very fast. Now that both points of view have been established, let’s move along.

Anybody, not just teachers, that wants somebody to write down something such as questions from the board, and refuses to photocopy it, claiming “it wastes paper” is foolish. If it takes one page to type, chances are that it will take more than one page to write out by hand. We can easily prove this by having, say, 100 students write down (by hand) one page typed. Since most people have bigger printing than size 12 font, this means that it takes more paper to write by hand than it does if it is typed. If 70 people of that study had bigger writing, this means that only 30% of people had smaller or equal to writing of the size 12 font. So that means 40% more paper than needed is being used. I'll give a margin of error on that hypothetical study 10%. Meaning between 30% and 50% more paper than necessary is being used. That means that in the end your saving money.

Let’s say that you’re in math class. The teacher asks you to write down some 30 problems into your notebook/scribbler/whatever. If you can’t see very well, or can’t tell a divide from a plus, then what happens is that you make mistakes and in turn lose marks. Math should always be photocopied for this reason and the one in the paragraph below.

The other and more important issue is that writing things down takes time. I will use Canadian Junior High’s class setup for this part. Let’s say there's 180 “instructional” days in a school year, and that you have 1 class of math everyday. Let’s also assume that you miss about 10 of these because of various interruptions. So that leaves 170. Let’s also say that your classes are 50 minutes each. So, in total that means you will spend 8,500 minutes in math class that year, which is about 141 hours 40 minutes. Now if you get say 5-10 minute of copying down notes per class, that’s 850-1700 minutes wasted. At the end of that range, it’s over 1 day (28 Hours) wasted, as well as up to 32 classes (1700 minutes) wasted. And if anyone wants to calculate in “man-hours” wasted, its 350-700 hours wasted per year with a class of 25.

There are a few ways to fix this problem.
1) Photocopy everything
2) Buy everyone pocket Pcs/Laptops and have them retrieve work that teachers have posted on a database
3) Buy textbooks that students can write/do problems in.

1) This is the easiest way of solving this problem, and is fairy self-explanatory, I don’t see a reason to expand on this very much expect one thing: it would take up some time on the teachers part.

2) This is the most expensive, costing millions of dollars overall. For a school of 1000, this would cost around $400,000 to $500,000 (400-500 each unit, I'm sure you'd get a discount if you bought 1000 units). And as well, these computers would also have to be replaced every so often because of how fast technology out dates. These computers would be left at school.

3) The last solution, and was well my favorite. Buying everyone activity-type books and letting students write in them. Saves a lot of time, as well as saving the students from copying down notes, and the teachers from photocopying. Everyone wins. You might have to have the student fee go up slightly, but however, it would be worth it.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed. I sure enjoyed writing it.

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