

Ask HN: Why is school rote memorization? - lukeqsee

I'm a high school student. I'm incredibly frustrated.<p>I feel like all I ever do is memorize things about which I don't care an iota. Be it history, chemistry, grammar or whatnot; they are all the same.<p>1) Memorize the material.
2) Take the test over said material.<p>I'm burnt out. Oh yeah, I can memorize fine. But why? To get a good grade? Pointless; I'll forget it in half a year, if it takes that long. (If I don't care about it.)<p>So HN, is all of school, and eventually life, memorization? Do I just need to suck it up, and get on with my memory work?<p>How should I continue?<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>
For informational purposes:<p>- Voracious reader.<p>- 30 on ACT. (With a 26 on math, because I had only covered 1/3 of Algebra 2. 34 reading, 32 english, 28 science.)<p>- Probably 110-130 IQ. (Never taken official test, but I can out-stride nearly all my peers easily; I live in a university town; had multiple educated people tell me I can do anything I want [i.e., the brains are there].)<p>- Love programming. (Have one site live at the moment, others that I've finished, but taken down.)<p>- Looking at Comp Sci major this Jan. (Provided I finish High School.)<p>Edit: Typo.
======
frossie
_Looking at Comp Sci major this Jan. (Provided I finish High School.)_

If? Finish high school!

Okay, tough love time: you are not the only person here who things school
sucks - you know why? Because school often does indeed suck. But it's not
forever. Yes, ideally school should be a great educational platform but yes,
sometimes you are stuck with third-rate teachers whose only interest in
teaching is to make you memorise stuff.

But guess what: being able to memorise stuff is not a bad skill. Being able to
do something that sucks in exchange for a future pay off (doing Comp Sci if
that is what you want) is absolutely a good skill.

I don't think anybody here would lack sympathy for your situation, but you
can't change your lousy school - you can only change yourself. Try and battle
burnout by challenging yourself - The Internet Is Your Friend (tm). If you are
being forced to memorise history dates, find a historical novel that deals
with the period and read it. If you are forced to memorise math/physics
formulas, find some of the great teachers online and work through their
material (eg. check out <http://blog.mrmeyer.com/> ).

Hang in there. No, all of life is not like that. But, life _is_ what you make
it.

~~~
lukeqsee
Thanks. That's exactly what I needed.

~~~
frossie
Being able to ask for help when you're down is also a good skill. I think
you'll do fine.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
You need to know stuff to have things to put together. School may seem just to
be about memorization, but you're doing yourself down if you memorize and then
discard.

Instead, _memorize and keep!_ The more you know, the more opportunities you'll
have for things to bang together, make sparks and create a fire in your belly.
Oddly enough, this can be true even of history or grammar, although it's
impossible to predict how.

Don't simply memorize, though. Work out for yourself how things fit together.
School is giving you this opportunity, but you need to take the chance.

------
wccrawford
1) Thinking is hard. Teaching people to think is harder.

2) You need to know (by rote) an incredible amount of random things to get by
in daily life. To be a professional, you need all of them and more, plus an
incredible amount of domain-specific knowledge.

If you don't think #2 is correct, try learning an Asian language. Since there
are very few similar words, you'll have to learn all of that random crap in
the new language and you'll suddenly realize how much school has prepared you
for life.

(Asian because it's totally different than European languages. If we were
typing in an Asian language, I'd suggest a European language instead.)

------
alok-g
Sharing some advice from my own experience:

1\. Hopefully you know what subject area interests you. You must not already
be memorizing here, or are you?

2\. Now pick subject areas that you find totally uninteresting. First off, how
sure are you that ten years down the road you would still find these
uninteresting and not regret the choices you are making today? That is exactly
what happened for me. More on this below.

3\. It is not generally the subject area that is uninteresting. What is
uninteresting is the way it is taught, or the book you may be using. I used to
find History, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Economics, etc. totally
uninteresting till 8th grade. Somebody then taught me a different way of
learning, which exactly was not learning by rote. All of a sudden, I was
finding majority of it interesting, though still not all. So if needed, find a
different book that you can "connect better" to. I generally end up reading
preface and first chapters of ten books before I select one that I'll read all
the way to the end.

4\. Reading books of your choice, following a method of educating yourself of
your choice, means twice the work -- since you would still have to be
memorizing some stuff just for the exams. Someone told me that real-life
education process involves balancing between these two. During my undergrad,
my goal then was to get just above average grades, since if I were getting
better grades, I could trade off some memorization effort to real
understanding effort. That's exactly what I did. By junior year, everybody
around knew that while I may not be the best student in terms of grades, I was
nevertheless the best student. Even the student with best grades was in
agreement as she used to state entirely on her own will. I was often titled
the most original thinker amongst the total group of 40+ students. And this
was because I spent time and effort avoiding plain memorization.

5\. You may find this one hard to swallow. Programming is not education (and
your priority at this point should be educating yourself), though computer
science is. Programming is just a tool to do things. If nothing else, make
yourself a master of mathematics, and treat computer science to be a small
branch of it. (Computer science as such is very deeply connected to
mathematics to be called a small branch of it, but that's not applicable to
you at this stage.) There are pieces of learning coming your way that won't
change for coming 100 years, and there are some that would change within two
years. You know how to prioritize between them. They used to focus a lot on
current events. To me, majority of the "current" issues were much less
important than ancient history (since those issues won't remain current in a
few months time-frame).

6\. Always be ready to step outside of your comfort zone. That practice would
help you all your life. (For now, maybe those uninteresting subjects are more
interesting than what you thought!)

------
pg
Because it's easy to test.

~~~
spooneybarger
and don't forget that many jobs aren't asking their holders to use critical
thinking or problem solving. they are asking them to learn how to do a task
and repeat it over and over again.

~~~
lukeqsee
What boring jobs.

~~~
spooneybarger
the world is filled with boring jobs. your goal should be getting yourself
into a position where you have the opportunity to do work that you don't find
boring.

from what you have written, i assume for you that means ones where you get to
think. working at mcdonalds doesn't involve much thinking. here is the burger,
here is the proscribed way to make a burger, here is what goes on it. if you
learn how to cook and get good at it, you can be in a position to play and
create your own dishes.

you could repeat the same basic story for most industries.

i know people who have programming jobs that involve taking a cookie cutter
website and adding some basic theme changes and providing customer specific
offers. they are bored to death doing it. some people would be happy just to
get the decent paycheck it provides.

my point was that most organizations are built around people who solve the
problems, come up with the tools to solve the problems and then others learn
how to use the tools and repeat the process over and over again. don't put
yourself in the position where you are one of the tool users if you want
something more challenging.

------
dwwoelfel
You need to raise your standards. History, chemistry, and grammar are all
important (to you personally, not just in general), fascinating subjects. If
you attempted to learn them, then memorization would be only one of the
learning tools that you would use. You wouldn't resent memorization because it
would allow you to make connections and truly understand what you are
studying.

Why is grammar important?

See these two Youtube videos by Lisa VanDamme of VanDamme Academy:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsYMr7VriYE>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxnI84C_gWo>

You can get _Rex Barks_ , which she references in the videos, here:
<http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1889439355/>

Why is history important and what's so great about memorization?

See these articles by Scott Powell:

Why History: <http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/004/why_history.html>

The Importance of Memorizing History: <http://www.secular-
homeschooling.com/008/powell.html>

~~~
lukeqsee
I never said I didn't want to learn those. Quite the opposite, I find them all
fascinating. I'm just driven insane by the means of teaching them.

~~~
dwwoelfel
If you've learned them, shouldn't you be able to breeze through the
memorization tests?

Do you think that they're having you memorize irrelevant information? Do you
think that memorization is not an important part of learning?

------
spooneybarger
Get into a 'good college' where you are required to problem solve. I left high
school early because I couldn't take the boring repetition of memorizing one
thing after another with little analysis or discussion. There are early
colleges you could consider, basically anything along the lines of
<http://www.simons-rock.edu/about>.

The big question with the 'good college' route is, have you done what I did in
HS: barely skate by, try not to get completely bored. If you have, then an
early college is probably the only way you are going to get into a 'good
college'. I had wonderfully high standardized test scores, IQ scores and a
pretty run of the mill GPA. I can't imagine where I would have ended up if I
had stayed in HS and ended up going to one of the 'large lecture hall' driven
Universities that were in my future.

All that said, yes, a large portion of life is memorization... but if you are
memorizing so you can put it to use solving problems, it becomes fun. if you
are memorizing just so you can pass a test, it isn't quite so much fun... plus
once the tests are over, reference books exist.

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da5e
I think you typoed voracious, but thanks for the new word, Veracious means
truthful and honest. Cool.

Dr NakaMats who has invented a huge number of incredible things recommends
memorization as an important part of preparation for what he calls
Ikispiration. <http://www.whatagreatidea.com/nakamatsu.htm>

Here's an excerpt from an interview: What are the teaching methods used to
prepare Japanese children for the strong competition they face? And how does
this affect creativity?

NakaMats:

One method is memorization. We teach our kids to memorize until the age of
twenty, for we have discovered that the human brain needs memorization up to
that point. Then young people can begin free-associating, putting everything
together. That’s how geniuses are formed. If a child doesn’t learn how to
memorize effectively, he doesn’t reach his full potential.

------
loupgarou21
I graduated from high school 10 years ago. It was not mostly Rote memorization
at the time, but I did get to see it turned into that. Starting the year after
I graduated, students were subjected to yearly standardized tests in all
subjects they were taking. The tests were very comprehensive from an
information standpoint. The student being passed onto the next grade was
subject to ther score on this test and teachers were evaluated based on how
their students did. The (state) program that required this was cancelled
almost immediately, but schools had already invested heavilly in the program
and so still continue to follow it here.

------
julius_geezer
Memory works best structured. Knowing that there were two US VPs who served as
such for different presidents gets you a few hundred points on Jeopardy, but
is otherwise kind of pointless; knowing how this happened tells you something
about the early Republic, with whose consequences we live today. So go beyond
the "facts" to what they summarize.

Grammar is never going to thrill most of us. But you should for your own sake
learn some foreign languages, and in many of those it is damned handy to know
an accusative from a dative or an infinitive from a participle. Again, learn
with the use.

------
TheAmazingIdiot
I was just like you. I thought that math, chemistry, physics, and computer
programming was the be-all end all. In fact, I went out of the way and made
fun of those who went on the side of the soft sciences and liberal arts. After
all, it's just stuffy old history, bad books that people love, and fancy
schmancy words to describe the brain that have no real understanding of the
neuroscience underneath....Right?

To give you an idea, Im finishing up an electrical engineering degree
alongside a IT security degree, all with a math minor. So, I'm no slouch when
it comes to the 'hard sciences', or I don't think I am. Now, where to begin.

English: Of all, engineers need to communicate with non-technical people, as
we're the technical people. They _have_ to trust us when we say 'this works',
'this cant work', or 'I don't know'. Now, how do we communicate this? We do
this by writing and speaking. Of course, you can 'write'. Now, is that writing
clear enough so that a technical topic can be understood by your non-technical
manager, or a VC you are applying to? English teaches you how to communicate
what's in your head so others can understand it. The other half is speech,
which I view just as important. In my free time, I am looking at volunteering
to teach computer literacy courses at the local food pantry/shelter so those
of low income can learn how to do things like make resumes and maintain
communications. Worksheets, handouts, and books only do so good. This case,
effective speech is just as important as the written word. A few misplaced
words or bad phrases can either cause confusion or just flat out offend.

Soft sciences: This is the hole where topics like psychology, sociology,
political science all fit. I think these studies would be apparent why they
could be useful to you. They help understand people and how to relate with
them. These sciences can explain the 'why' certain phrases work better than
others, and explain how to differ your speech and written patterns when
dealing with different cultures. And many of these 'softer sciences' use good
ol statistics to make their deductions, so they directly relate back to hard
sciences. On the darker side, you can exploit these topics to get people to do
your will, because you would understand deeper parts of culture than they
would pay attention to. If you were to do this, you would be a tech geek with
swaying power: People would come to _you_ for answers. And yes, that has a lot
of power attached to it.

History: This is, by far, the hardest for me to relate. It does, by a sort of
roundabout way. It's also my one weakest skill, so bear with me here. History
meant to me 'stuff' that occurred long ago that would never pertain to me. I
mean, how does stuffy dead people do anything to me? Well, lets talk about
some unrelated topics.

Lets talk about Markov chains. They're a powerful statistical inference tool.
So, who's Markov? Well, he died in 1922, in Russia. Yet, his models and math
are used to this day. We'll use his theorems until somebody has better. And
his was worked on from earlier theorems and assumptions. If you understand the
history, look it as a CVS. If there's an assumption in there, we can work back
and understand the root why and 'fix' it or disregard it.

But that is just a tangent of why history is useful. The essence is so we
understand how we got to now, by what path, and why. Things that are obvious
now weren't so before. History can allow us to understand the whys of math, of
psychology, of weaponry, physics, chemistry, of religion, and any other topic.
Effectively, the true meaning of history is "not the future and not the
present". Even your file system is a historical document that can be inferred
upon using statistics and psychology techniques.

Perhaps I cleared up a bit of at least why I value the liberal and softer arts
and sciences.

