On the contrary, I took meticulous notes and also aced my math degree. Part of grokking (for me) is taking the words someone else is saying, jumbling them up in my head, and turning them into coherent sentences. Additionally, a lot of the math classes I took didn't have books (or if they did, the books were drab and useless), so each day was a race to scribble out the proofs we did in class that you needed to understand to do the HW.
I even had one class where the final was essentially a recitation of proofs we did all semester in lecture (notes, no book) in which you had 90 minutes to do 6 proofs. Things like Green's Theorem, proof of irrationality of pi (Niven's proof), proof of the Chain Rule, F.T. of Arithmetic, a bunch of other stuff.
I even had one class where the final was essentially a recitation of proofs we did all semester in lecture (notes, no book) in which you had 90 minutes to do 6 proofs. Things like Green's Theorem, proof of irrationality of pi (Niven's proof), proof of the Chain Rule, F.T. of Arithmetic, a bunch of other stuff.