tania, you should be entitled to a note-taker. "should" might be the operative word, but the disability support office at your college/university ought to provide a note-taker (I think this is another student in the class who knows s/he is taking notes on behalf of a disabled student), or possibly allow you to use a hand-held voice recorder (so you can listen again, if that works better than reading again).
note: none of this (copying other students' notes, using a recorder, or any such thing) may be done informally--you must either have the permission of the teacher or go through the disability office
Hand held voice recorder wouldnt have helped as I couldnt listen and remember anything I heard when I say anything I mean basically nothing. I may only remember one little fact after listening to a whole lecture, I'd have to listen 1000s of times to get the info from one lecture.
I did have another student give me all her lecture notes but couldnt read half of her writing (many of the students used their own shortenings and abreviations when taking lecture notes.
What would of helped me greatly at the time was if I'd been given the lectures typed.. maybe if that had been done I may of been able to continue with my studies longer then what I ended up doing.
I did get put on the program for students with disability but they never offered that option to actually just give the class notes to me.. just for me to do like independant studies where I just answered questions out of the whole text book etc (rather then the teachers/class notes).. thing is I wasnt able to understand much of what I was reading in the medical text books (hard to learn medical subjects alone) so needed a teacher to simplier explain and help me due to my decreased comprehesion ability.
I did have two tutorial sessions with a higher grade student who tried to me..but two sessions cant explain a whole year of stuff. I would of needed constant tutorial.
So it ended up even with special compensions given to me eg allowed to delay exams, longer periods to do exams in (cause I was writing very slow) etc etc. I just couldnt do it, as I didnt know any of the info. I dont think I will ever get over how disheartened I felt after a whole year of trying so so hard and pushing myself with the result of getting bedbound for 9mths.