Online Notebook Paper: Fill & Download for Free

Yes.Both lazy AND impatient.But it’s not just students… plenty of adults are the same way.All of my students (ages 11–14) have had 1:1 tech for as long as I’ve been teaching (12 years). The majority of them have about a 10-second window of effort for solving a problem with their tech before just giving up and avoiding the problem or just accepting it and moving on without fixing it. If they can’t figure out the answer to something just by Googling it, then many of them think that the answer isn’t worth figuring out.When I was a student, we had Cliff Notes… summarized versions of novels… for students who were too lazy to read the actual novel. Cliff Notes were pretty much banned in school. It was considered cheating. Now, students have a variety of websites with those same kinds of summaries, and many students use them. They may still read or skim the novel, but they use the online summaries to understand what they just half-assed read.Or, even better, they just find a youtube video of someone explaining the novel to them, so they don’t even have to read the summary, but just listen to someone else explain it to them.But the easiest way to see how tech has made students lazy is when I ask them to write a story or essay on notebook paper instead of typing it. They will groan and complain about it, begging to just type it instead. I call it being “hand lazy.”They’ve also gotten lazier about organization, planning, and other executive functioning skills. Instead of writing down their homework in a physical planner, most of them claim they will just “ask the group chat when they get home.” Of course, many of them forget to actually do that. They don’t worry about taking home the correct books for their homework. As long as just one of them has the book, that person can send pictures of the necessary pages to everyone else. (Or just send the answers… yes, students, we know when you do that.)Some might call those “problem solving skills.” Others might call it laziness. Either way, there isn’t much teachers can do about it.

My average day goes as follows:Wake up at 6 or so* and glance through the ArXiv and see what other people in my field have submitted to journals in the past day. Mark and print out the ones that I want to understand (normally 1-3 a day).Check results of a computer simulation or numerical calculation I left running overnight. Make some plots and put together an email to myself and my collaborators, if appropriate. Write up the results of the simulation in an online notebook, so I have a record.Go to the gym, or run, then shower and bike to work.Spend a few hours coding before lunch.Read the articles I marked in the morning over lunch, and see if any give me an idea. Work out on paper a rough sketch of the idea, and maybe walk down the hallway to see what someone else thinks.More coding, or an afternoon group meeting of some sort or another. Oftentimes, I'm also helping less senior students solve some problem or another in the late afternoon. This is my least productive time of day (hence why I'm answering this question on Quora right now). Start some long simulation or numerical calculation that will finish by the morning.Go home and have dinner, or meet people for dinnerDo my pen and paper work on a whiteboard I have in my room, often with a scotch. My cat tries to help, but mostly gets in the way (cats aren't good at math). If I'm teaching, this is when I get my grading done.Relax from 9 or so until midnight, then repeatMy weekends (when I'm in town) are pretty much the same, except I skip the going in to work part, and try to clean house after lunch when I'm not very good at thinking anyway.* This is probably early for a theorist, but I think best in the morning.

I would recommend either Overleaf: Real-time Collaborative Writing and Publishing Tools with Integrated PDF Preview or ShareLaTeX, Online LaTeX Editor. As their names imply they use latex and are really convenient for producing and sharing any engineering/ scientific papers.