My teacher assigns to take notes in for readings, but the problem is I don’t know what to take notes and what’s important. I used to get really obsessed and it took me a few hours just to take notes. So for right now, every time there is a name, date, or anything in bullet points, or bolded, I’m taking notes. To those of you who took APUSH, how do you know what’s important?
I took APUSH as a junior, and I had a strategy that worked for me. I would read a paragraph, and if I couldn’t tell what was important enough to write down, I would concisely summarize the paragraph. I used a bullet system, where each note was a bullet point, and elaborations were indented bullet points. Each paragraph summary was its own bullet point.
IME, it was important to know the order in which things happened and the era they happened in, but not necessarily exact dates. For example, cotton gin, Missouri Compromise, election of Lincoln, secession of North Carolina, Civil War. This is simplified, but it shows that all those things led up to the Civil War, without focusing too much on minute details.