How to take notes in a class you do not understand

By Planr.ai · 19 September 2026 · 6 min read

Standard note-taking advice assumes you are following the lesson. When you are not, the advice to write things in your own words is useless, because you do not have words for it yet.

Stop trying to write good notes

When a class is over your head, the goal changes. You are not producing a document to revise from; you are producing a record complete enough to rebuild the lesson from later. Those need different things on the page.

Copy the board exactly, including the parts that make no sense, and do not stop to tidy anything. The version that looks messy and contains everything beats the neat version missing the step you did not understand — which will be the step the whole thing hinges on.

Mark the confusion instead of hiding it

Put a question mark in the margin the moment you lose the thread, and keep writing. Later, those marks are the most valuable thing on the page: they are a precise list of what to fix, made at the moment you lost it rather than reconstructed from a fog three days later.

Draw a line across the page when the topic changes, even if you did not follow either topic. Structure you can see is structure you can ask about — it is much easier to ask what the second half was about than to ask about the whole lesson.

Write the exact words the teacher repeats. Repeated phrasing is usually the definition that will appear on the test.
Record the examples in full, even without the principle. Examples are reconstructible into a rule; a rule you half-heard is not reconstructible into anything.
Note every time the teacher says this will be on the test, or this is the one people get wrong. Two seconds, high value.
If there is a handout, annotate it rather than copying it. Copying a handout is the purest form of busy-work.

Record the audio if you are allowed

Ask first — most teachers say yes when a student explains they are struggling to keep up, and some schools have a policy. A recording turns an incomprehensible fifty minutes into something you can replay at the point where the question mark is, which is a different experience from trying to remember what was said around it.

Do not replay the whole thing; that is fifty minutes you do not have. Go to your question marks, listen to two minutes around each, and write what you find. Planr's lecture recorder produces a transcript and organised notes from the recording, which mostly saves the scrubbing back and forth to find the moment.

The same evening, spend fifteen minutes

This is the part that decides whether the class was a waste. Within a day, take the page and do three things: fill in what you now remember around the gaps, look up two of your question marks in the textbook, and write the one sentence you would use to answer what was this lesson about.

If you cannot write that sentence, the lesson has not landed yet, and that is the signal to get help now rather than at revision time. Fifteen minutes on the day is worth about an hour of untangling a fortnight later, because on the day you still have the context that the notes leave out.

Asking, when asking is hard

One specific question gets a better answer than an admission of general confusion, and is far easier to say. I did not follow why step three becomes negative is answerable in twenty seconds. I do not understand any of this is not.

That is another reason to mark the question marks as they happen: at the end of the lesson you have three specific questions to ask, and you can ask the best one on the way out of the room rather than in front of everyone.

If you are lost for more than about two lessons in a row, the problem is usually a gap further back rather than the current topic. Say that to the teacher directly — I think I lost this at the point we did X — and you will get a much more useful answer than a repeat of today's lesson.

When it is the whole course

If every lesson is like this, note-taking is not the lever. Something earlier in the sequence is missing, and the fix is to go back and rebuild that, which is uncomfortable and much faster than attending three more months of lessons you cannot follow.

Find the last topic that made sense and work forward from there with the textbook, a tutor, or a patient friend. A week spent on the gap usually returns the rest of the term.