I'm doing a clean, a serious clean and I'm wondering if it would be worth keeping all my notes from my first two years. What has your experience been?

I'm doing a serious clean of my office right now, Nannerl, and I have found some notes from my college classes taken (*gulp*) over 30 years ago. I have two observations:

1.) In the intervening 30+ years, I've never once used them for any substantive purpose, and they've been hopelessly out of date for a long time.

...but...

2.) The sentimental value of being able to look them over is real and significant. It was quite the trip down memory lane to look it over and remember the student I was way back then.

So, my advice would be to keep your notes for one or two classes (your favorites, or the ones you think could conceivably be useful down road and/or be less likely to become outdated), and recycle the rest.

After a few decades you will be amazed at:
- how much more you know now than you did then
- how much you have grown
- the gems of wisdom that you did have
- forgotten reasons of why you do things now because of what you learned then, which lets you reassess if you still want this

I still have my notes, and I do consult them every once in a while.

Funny, I was just thinking the other day how much more I knew then than I know now...every time I read one of my old reports, I am impressed with my previous intelligence and wonder what happened to it....

I have not kept my notes - threw everything after about 10 yrs of not using or looking at them. Kept the text books though - they still come in handy for teaching.
Assuming you are talking about hand-written notes - if you wanted to keep them - you could scan them and keep electronically.

Good luck.

I kept nothing from any of my university courses that didn't fit in my head. My wife, on the other hand, still has crates and crates of stuff that she hasn't looked (so far as I know) in 30 years. We've moved it all with us when we've moved house about a half-dozen times. Each to his own, I guess.

You're asking a Hoarder here. Yes, keep them. I've got mine from 40+ years ago. I actually did go through some of them recently and found some really valuable material. It was also very interesting to read quotes from some of the great lecturers I had, who are now no longer with us. There was also a fair bit of "what are you doing for lunch today?" scribbled on the edges, from people I have long since forgotten.

I think I've kept everything from my music courses. The biggest binders are those for music history, piano literature.... and conducting! My old term papers crack me up now. At my undergrad school we borrowed books -- they actually loaned them to us like a high school. It was great! So I only have books from graduate school, but also have my parents' music textbooks from the late 60s-early 70s. I love my books. Keep them all around on shelves in the studio.

I also have every one of my Franklin Planner binders (now Franklin-Covey or something like that) going back to 1992. Yes, 1992. My "geek-book" collection as I am told. I don't write as much in them as I did then, but keep ordering new filler-papers every year. It's a habit (haha - Covey joke there).

When I am feeling really over-scheduled, I like to pull out the 1992-1995 binders and muse over my old ability to manage 80-hour weeks.

I only kept the stuff that I thought was applicable to what I'm doing now. Notes from Music History courses I didn't keep simply because all of that information can easily be found on the internet or by going to the library and looking at a textbook. My pedagogy notes I have kept and I have looked at them now and then. I have kept some of the research papers I've written, although I've not referred to them I don't think. But I did all that work...

Nannerl Mozart, congrats on doing a thorough cleaning! It's sometimes surprising what you find when you take time to organize your space.

I do not have notes from college (since my degree is in another field), but I have notes from lessons with my mentor, lessons with a jazz guy, and from workshops...and even notes from a few posts here on PW.

I do not like having a variety of notes/notebooks here and there. It's disorganzed and not particularly useful. Having read this thread, I now plan to go through my notes and recopy them neatly--just including the main points. It will be good to review the content and get all notes organized in the same place.

You have way more notes than I do. But you may be able to sort through and pull out what matters from your notes. It will take time, but will be worth the investment IMO. When you go looking for info from your notes, you'll know where to find it.

Currawong, my father is a pathological hoarder ... his house doesn't look much different to this -
http://thekrazycouponlady.com/core/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Hoarding.jpg

generally when people tell me that they are hoarders ... I say that they haven't met my father.

My mum and I (my parents are separated - she moved out when his problem was unbearable and unlivable) have this anti-hoarding complex, we tend to want to throw everything out. I live in an apartment so I do generally want to throw a lot out. Mind you, I have kept some books from primary school. I wrote an autobiography when I was 11, it was 30 pages long ... I enjoy reading it when I have a bad day, it's actually quite funny. I've also kept all my journals (I started journalling at 12)

I'm impressed though that quite a few have kept their notes and some have even looked back at them. I record lectures, atleast with the lectures I like ... and there are few lectures where I am, and more tutorials. Thanks for the suggestions. Right now I keep my semester notes in trays, labeled. At the end of every semester I empty them out into manilla folders. Having said that, this process is taking too much space. I'm thinking about resorting to a filing cabinet.

How about the suggested idea of scans kept neatly on a CD or two? If you consecrate say 30 minutes a day, it won't take much of a bite out of any day, but you will see the pile of your collection diminish and eventually vanish.

For me, it always helps to get back to the basics, reread my notes once in a while, remember what principles my teaching is grounded in. That's why I keep them. My psychology notes on the other hand have long since gone into the circular file.

Keep the books, throw out the notes.

What books? There was a lot of hands-on teaching and repertoire building in my undergrad pedagogy classes. It wasn't until grad school that we delved into the history of pedagogy.