I Had A Random Thought...

[SecretAsianMan]

I get what you're saying. But when you have a question on a history test asking what date a certain event occurred, no amount of critical thinking is going to produce the answer you need to write down. The metrics that people are graded on in many subjects do tend to rely on lots of memorization in my experience and yet people still do fine in these subjects relative to math.

 

I don't know that I agree with you entirely.  I can recall taking a history test before asking for a date of an event.  I'm really bad at remember dates and such, but I came up with the answer by thinking about what caused the event and the sequence that led up to it.  While it's true that the actual date was a thing that I remembered, I didn't arrive at the answer because I just reached into my memory and pulled the date out.  I sat down and reasoned it out for a bit.  You can call it a memorization technique if you want (which it is) but I don't think it's devoid of critical thinking.

 

Related to this, I've always been bothered by the heavy emphasis on memorization in schools.  I understand that knowing things is important, but why are we denying another critical (and far more useful in real life) skill: knowing how to find information.  I've never had a situation in my real life where I was told I'm not allowed to use the resources available to me to find information when I need it.  I sometimes joke that if I ever get an intern, I'm going to give them an assignment where they can't use any books, notes, or other resources to complete because I'm what their education has been preparing them for.  If they ignore me and do those things anyway, all the better.

[Ninety-Three]

Related to this, I've always been bothered by the heavy emphasis on memorization in schools.  I understand that knowing things is important, but why are we denying another critical (and far more useful in real life) skill: knowing how to find information.  I've never had a situation in my real life where I was told I'm not allowed to use the resources available to me to find information when I need it.  I sometimes joke that if I ever get an intern, I'm going to give them an assignment where they can't use any books, notes, or other resources to complete because I'm what their education has been preparing them for.  If they ignore me and do those things anyway, all the better.

 

This is particularly egregious when it comes to teaching programming. Some classes will make you write out short code segments on paper tests, and you will lose marks for missing semicolons, despite the fact that any development program on the planet will highlight a missing semicolon for you like it's spellcheck. A missing semicolon will never cost a real programmer anything other than a few seconds of their time. I can't tell if it's a holdover from the punch card and assembly language days when writing syntactically flawless code was actually useful, or if it's just that memorization and paper tests are how the rest of the system works, and no one thought to change it for this area.

[syntheticgerbil]

I hate reading things on a phone, or doing any kind of browsing really. Typing is even worse. I don't know how people stand it, or enjoy it (which they must do, considering how many faces you see buried in phones).

I always hit the O button if I want to hit the P button. I always hit the P button if I want to hit the O button. I always click the wrong link when browsing the web. If I try to hold down a thing I'm always accidentally swiping. I'm so terrible at phones.

 

Have you tried using an absurdly large phone

Beautifully worded.

[Gormongous]

I don't know that I agree with you entirely.  I can recall taking a history test before asking for a date of an event.  I'm really bad at remember dates and such, but I came up with the answer by thinking about what caused the event and the sequence that led up to it.  While it's true that the actual date was a thing that I remembered, I didn't arrive at the answer because I just reached into my memory and pulled the date out.  I sat down and reasoned it out for a bit.  You can call it a memorization technique if you want (which it is) but I don't think it's devoid of critical thinking.

 

Yeah, I would never ever give a test that simply asked for a specific date for a single event in isolation. I know a few old-school teachers who might, but their pedagogy is mostly shit all around, because that's what "old school" means in this situation.

 

There are two contexts in which any teacher should be asking a student to associate an event with a date: i) given a list of dates and a list of events, do they have the skills in critical thinking to assemble the events into a chronological list using the connections between them; and ii) given a single event and several dates, do they have a grasp on historical developments overall to place the event in its appropriate year, decade, or century. In both cases, the dates are a pretext for the question and a structural element in it, but only because they're an easy way to trick students into thinking critically about chronology. There is literally no use in me asking you the exact year that the Third Lateran Council took place (1179, a telling two years after the Truce of Venice), and that's me speaking as someone whose research is as close to traditional politico-dynastic narrative as it gets these days and as someone who uses late antique, medieval, and early modern dates as a mnemonic to remember how much money he has in his checking account (incidentally, the siege of Damascus right now).

 

Actually... No, in extremely high-level exams, like for doctoral comprehensives, there is a utility to asking what happened in 1215, for instance, because it's important for late-stage specialists to know exactly how history is everything happening all at once all over the world, but that's someone who's been in school for twenty-odd years. Before that point, and without an independent interest in history, dates are entirely unnecessary and teachers who test on them are bad at their jobs.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I always hit the O button if I want to hit the P button. I always hit the P button if I want to hit the O button.

 

Me too, so I just got a keyboard that has actually good auto correct because it pays attention to the words I use.

 

Every time I type "of the" it suggests 'Necrodancer' is my next word.

[dibs]

Me too, so I just got a keyboard that has actually good auto correct because it pays attention to the words I use.

 

Every time I type "of the" it suggests 'Necrodancer' is my next word.

 

Don't ever work for a newspaper. "The man died from what the coroner described as an accidental profusion of the Necrodancer".

[Merus]

In high school science tests, we were provided with lists of formulas, because why memorise that shit when what they care about is whether or not you can predict exactly what happens when a bowling ball falls off a shelf.

 

Same with history: we wrote an essay. More than a few subjects involved writing essays under exam conditions, and I was never very good at it.

 

Also, that episode of the West Wing about the various map projections always seemed strange to me, because we learn about map projections in geography and it never occurred to me that teachers wouldn't teach people that maps are imperfect 2D representations of a 3D object.

[tberton]

Yeah, I would never ever give a test that simply asked for a specific date for a single event in isolation. I know a few old-school teachers who might, but their pedagogy is mostly shit all around, because that's what "old school" means in this situation.

 

Heck, I wouldn't even write a trivia question that was just about a single date in isolation. It's just a boring way to create a question.

[SecretAsianMan]

Heck, I wouldn't even write a trivia question that was just about a single date in isolation. It's just a boring way to create a question.

 

Sadly that is the one time I've had to resort to straight memorization.  I was part of the Quiz Team in high school and getting a question like that is pretty standard fare.

[Zeusthecat]

If you guys are arguing that memorizing things isn't useful and that we can solve everything through critical thinking, I think I disagree. Memorization can provide shortcuts to information that would otherwise take more time to reason through and arrive at the correct answer. Yeah, it's great if I can solve the derivative of sine manually every time I see it. But why waste all that time when I can just remember that the answer is cosine.

Of course, just memorizing things without understanding them is pretty useless. But I definitely see merit in memorizing things that you have already reasoned through. And let's be real here, when you have 50 minutes to take an exam, you will have a much harder time doing well if you haven't taken some time to memorize certain critical things.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Memorizing the derivative of sine is useful and its great. All kinds of memorization is useful! But it matters how that memorization comes about. There are dates and mathematical identities I will not forget, but I remember them because I used them so much.

Memorizing things for the sake of memorization is bullshit. Memorizing things because you use them a lot is fine!

[Zeusthecat]

Memorizing the derivative of sine is useful and its great. All kinds of memorization is useful! But it matters how that memorization comes about. There are dates and mathematical identities I will not forget, but I remember them because I used them so much.

Memorizing things for the sake of memorization is bullshit. Memorizing things because you use them a lot is fine!

Totally. Memorizing things you will never use is useless. But committing things to memory that you will use is incredibly important and I disagree with the notion that you can get through most subjects without having to spend time committing concepts to memory. Even in the history test example, you may be able to figure out certain events through reasoning, but guess what? Your reasoning is based on other events or things you learned at one point that you committed to memory. There is no escaping that memorizing things is a fundamental way that we build on our own knowledge.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm not saying that memorization isn't useful nor am I suggesting that no one should memorize anything ever.  Knowing information is handy, but it's pretty useless without the ability derive meaning from that knowledge.  Ask students who take a knowledge based exam the same questions a month later and I doubt you'll get the right answers.  But if it's an exam that relies on critical thinking instead of memorizing, I'm willing to bet they'll be able to repeat their performance much easier.  That's what should be taught, not reliance on memorizing things that are likely to be forgotten.

[Gormongous]

Totally. Memorizing things you will never use is useless. But committing things to memory that you will use is incredibly important and I disagree with the notion that you can get through most subjects without having to spend time committing concepts to memory. Even in the history test example, you may be able to figure out certain events through reasoning, but guess what? Your reasoning is based on other events or things you learned at one point that you committed to memory. There is no escaping that memorizing things is a fundamental way that we build on our own knowledge.

 

If it helps you to make the distinction, I think that remembering things is an important part of learning, but I think memorizing things is useless except in a rare few cases where there is no better option for pedagogy. The former has a process and a context that gives it meaning and helps it to build critical thinking, the latter is just the pointless acquisition of information that people regularly mistake for true learning.If you've just memorized your multiplication tables without any supplementary teaching, then you can tell me that five times nine is forty-five but cannot tell me why. You know nothing, you know trivia. It's a terrible way of teaching people and I'm glad that math, which has always tended towards memorization to paper over basic concepts that are easy to get bogged down in, has found some new ways to be taught, even if they look foreign to me.

 

 

EDIT: I wanted to work Nassim Nicholas Taleb's theories from his book Black Swan into this mini-rant, about the human tendency to over-value knowledge and treat its existence as more important than its use, but I couldn't, so I'll just link a brief review instead: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

[Zeusthecat]

If it helps you to make the distinction, I think that remembering things is an important part of learning, but I think memorizing things is useless except in a rare few cases where there is no better option for pedagogy. The former has a process and a context that gives it meaning and helps it to build critical thinking, the latter is just the pointless acquisition of information that people regularly mistake for true learning.If you've just memorized your multiplication tables without any supplementary teaching, then you can tell me that five times nine is forty-five but cannot tell me why. You know nothing, you know trivia. It's a terrible way of teaching people and I'm glad that math, which has always tended towards memorization to paper over basic concepts that are easy to get bogged down in, has found some new ways to be taught, even if they look foreign to me.

Man, I just really disagree here. If you learn how multiplication works and can prove out all of your multiplication tables, it is totally valuable to then memorize all of those for quick access. It isn't worthless trivia. And I don't know about you but when I learned math as a kid we spent plenty of time learning how multiplication works before memorizing our times tables. I know we all want to think that everything about our education system is broken but I don't buy the notion that the majority of teachers out there are just teaching kids brainless memorization without teaching the underlying concepts first.

I know you're trying to make a distinction between memorizing and remembering things you've learned but I don't see that distinction, which maybe explains my frustration with what you guys are arguing. Memorizing something is nothing more than committing it to memory. Whether you understand it or not is besides the point. Yes, critical thinking is important and there should be more of a focus on that over just regurgitating data. But let's not ignore how vital of a role memorization plays in critical thinking. Every step of your thought process while thinking about a problem relies on information you have memorized.

And I'll even go one step further and say that there are even a ton of cases where memorizing things without fully understanding them is valuable and comes up in life constantly. In programming, for instance, you constantly memorize functions and classes that can save you a ton of time. You may not know all the ins and outs of how it works but you have a basic concept of what it does and you memorize it so you can easily apply it again without having to look it up every time. And just in every day life you memorize things constantly. Your social security number, what streets to turn on to get to work, how much certain groceries cost, your family members' birthdays, the size of your clothes, and on and on. I would say these "rare cases" where we need to memorize things are not so rare at all.

[jennegatron]

I mean spending a year tutoring kids tells me that they don't actually understand that multiplication serves as a short hand of adding something to itself x times, and I would have to routinely reexplain it to them, and even if a kid knew their times table, they couldn't tell me what the problems actually meant when they solved them. I think a lot of kids just memorize specifically multiplication tables through rote memorization with no deeper understanding of what's going on underneath. And this becomes a problem when they're unable to apply these abstract processes into applied scenarios, so that when I ask them how many inches is measured by 3 rulers they can't tell me the answer is 36 because they don't realize that 12 * 3 is just the sum of 3 rulers on top of each other, but if I asked them what is 12 * 3, they would have the answer for me because they memorized it.

[Dewar]

I was lucky enough to have teachers for history that assigned essay questions, so there was at least some critical thinking involved.

 

But the class that had the most memorization of any class I ever took was second year (organic) chemistry. You just have to know how to name all these molecules, and all these standard reactions, and you just have to memorize them all. I scored in the 90% percentile on the ACS test at the end of the year, so I guess I'm good at memorizing things.

[Zeusthecat]

And that is definitely a failing on the teacher's part in my opinion. I really don't think however, that most teachers are out there going "here, memorize all of this" without ever going over these concepts. Maybe I had some unique curriculum as a kid but we spent months easing into multiplication and understanding it before we got to the part where we just straight up memorized our times tables.

And I'm not sure your example is even necessarily indicative of that being the case. For all we know, 90% of the class may have understood these concepts perfectly and had no problem and the ones that needed tutoring are those few that either didn't pay enough attention or just had a much harder time grasping the concepts.

[tberton]

I think some clarification is in order here, at least for my position: I think memorization is a perfectly fine tool for retrieving knowledge - I use it all the time for a lot of the examples that Zeus brought up. However, memorization as pedagogy is pretty terrible. Once you've learned something, memorizing it is fine. But memorization should not be how you learn it.

 

To go back to the Common Core math example, I don't think anyone's saying that older styles of teaching arithmetic were entirely based on memorization. However, that's often what they have to fall back on, because the standard algorithm is super confusing and obfuscating. Subtraction is one that gets brought up in a lot of Internet memes about Common Core, but the fact is that the way I learned subtraction in school makes no damn sense. Look at this image for instance:

 

 

The "old fashion" way here actually makes far less sense than the Common Core method. It tells us nothing about why 32 - 12=20. It would make even less sense if the question asked for 32 - 13, because then you'd have to get into all the nonsense about "borrowing" numbers. That stuff confused me a lot as a kid and I was always good at math. I think it's that kind of seemingly arbitrary stuff that turned off a lot of people I know from math at a young age.

 

Compare that to the Common Core method and you see how straightforward the latter is. First, it's probably just an expanded version of how you'd teach very basic subtraction. If I wanted to show a five-year old what 9 - 5 is, I'd get them to put 9 fingers up and then put 5 of them down. This is the exact same thing, just reversed and with a few more steps. Moreover, it actually shows at a much more basic level what subtraction is than the standard algorithm - that is, subtraction is the reverse process of addition. It's laid right out. When it comes time to teach these kids more complex algebra, my guess is that it would be a lot easier to convince them that x - y = z is the same equation as x - z = y, because their understanding of arithmetic has the relationship between addition and subtraction at its core.

 

Sorry, that was a bit ranty. That image got shared on my Facebook recently and I've been simmering about it. The point is mostly just that the standard algorithm encourages memorization because of how obfuscating it is. The Common Core method shows the underlying principles a lot more clearly and so memorization is less necessary.

[Dewar]

I guess I just don't really understand because math is my thing, but the old way (taking the more difficult form of your question, 32 - 13, breaks down like this:

 

32 = 30 + 2 & 13 = 10 + 3 (basic number construction)

32 = 20 + 12 (carry the one)

20 - 10 = 10 (subtract the tens)

12 - 3 = 9 (subtract the ones)

Answer = 10 + 9 = 19

 

So there is an underlying process going on there. It might not be taught very well, but there is a pattern there, and it feels like it extends to larger numbers a lot better.

 

Edit: Not that I'm against teaching the new way. I think that teaching things in as many different ways as possible is a plus. I just don't think we should just throw out the old way.

[Twig]

I've never heard of "Common Core" until it was brought up here.

 

I have no idea what that image you posted is even doing.

 

I will say that I never had any problems understand how to do it the old-fashioned way, and it makes perfect sense to me.

[Zeusthecat]

I've seen that image and it honestly confuses the hell out of me. I would have to spend some time learning why they are adding 3 and then 5 and then 10 and then 2.

I feel like I could just as easily say that the traditional way makes just as much sense. What do you need to add to 12 to get 32? 20. Do this a bunch of times with a bunch of different examples so that you understand what subtraction is relative to addition, then you learn the trick involving borrowing numbers to handle quickly subtracting big numbers from other big numbers.

Both approaches are perfectly valid to me and the part I take issue with is that students doing common core have to now do it that very specific way because the problems are constructed to only allow them to solve them using those methods. And to throw my anecdotal evidence into the mix, my daughter got 0/12 on her last math quiz because she isn't grasping these concepts. Even though I've been working on addition with her for years and she can add 1357 to 2378 without breaking a sweat. Common core seems to suffer from the same problems traditional math does: teachers just aren't very good at communicating it in a way that makes sense.

[Dewar]

They are counting up from 12 to 32 by first moving up to the nearest 5, then counting in 5s and 10s (based on that grouping of 5 thing off of Zeus's daughter's homework) until they get near 32, then counting the last 2.

 

Edit: Extending out to a larger number might make more sense. Taking, Zeus's numbers 2378-1357

 

1357 + 3 = 1360

1360 + 40 = 1400

1400+ 900 = 2300

2300 + 70 = 2370

2370 + 8 = 2378

 

2378-1357 = 3 + 40 + 900 + 70 + 8 

 

Then it's regular addition from there. I also might have skipped a few steps in between, but you get the general gist.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think this is confusing to us since we've learned our way so well it's been abstracted into our brains as how basic calculation works and is semi automatic. So if you try to consciously figure it out a new way it's very disruptive.

Think about it this way. You know how to walk, but you have no clue how to move those individual muscles, you just walk.

[Gormongous]

I mean spending a year tutoring kids tells me that they don't actually understand that multiplication serves as a short hand of adding something to itself x times, and I would have to routinely reexplain it to them, and even if a kid knew their times table, they couldn't tell me what the problems actually meant when they solved them. I think a lot of kids just memorize specifically multiplication tables through rote memorization with no deeper understanding of what's going on underneath. And this becomes a problem when they're unable to apply these abstract processes into applied scenarios, so that when I ask them how many inches is measured by 3 rulers they can't tell me the answer is 36 because they don't realize that 12 * 3 is just the sum of 3 rulers on top of each other, but if I asked them what is 12 * 3, they would have the answer for me because they memorized it.

 

Yeah, this is my experience with almost all of my teaching, and I teach college students. My first year, as a TA for a frankly terrible professor, I had a huge minority of students write essays about how the USA fought the USSR in the Second World War because class had skipped over that (please don't ask) and they had only been taught about the subsequent Cold War, wherein the USA did "fight" the USSR. Lacking one fact, they simply substituted another related fact into the essay. Much of the result of standardized testing is that students are fixated on learning these discrete "facts" that can be easily deployed during exams, rather than looking for the processes or context that create those facts and are actually the important things to know. Like I said in my initial post on this topic, memorization is the last stage of learning about something, reserved for information that can't be taught in any other way, but for some reason, probably to do in part with a culture of "cramming" or whatever, many people treat memorization as a way to skip actually having to learn anything. If you've memorized the facts, it's apparently not necessary to understand them.