

How To Study: 4th Grade & Social Studies - cschanck
http://designbygravity.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/how-to-study-4th-grade-and-social-studies/

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stralep
In first year of college I had math classes, and use of scratch paper was
forbidden. (and solving system of 4-5 linear equations on 4cm by 4cm part of
paper is really interesting resource problem :)

I guess math teachers hate reading their students... At least in my college.

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lachyg
Am I reading this right? This girl is 10... This isn't a stab at the author.
It's great that he is getting good study habits for his daughter at an early
age. It's more at the education system. I really don't think 10 year old's
should have to do this type of study each night. They are 10!

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w1ntermute
Considering how little the average parent in America helps their grade school
age children with their classes, I'd say that making your 10 year old study
like this every night is far from the worst thing you could do to them.

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cschanck
One thing I've noticed is that here reluctance/enthusiasm to study is directly
tied to how efficient she feels the studying will be. If she knows she'll get
an A because she does effort Y, she will do effort Y. My problem with the
school system is that studying is too disconnected from results, and so kids
end up feeling like their test results are random. That's a killer.

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tkahn6
I still fail to understand why the ability to memorize a bunch of facts is so
valuable, or more importantly why it should be such a necessary and important
skill in K-12 education.

Does this have any application in the 'real world'? I would imagine critical
thinking and problem solving are much, much more useful.

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mahipal
Memorizing facts isn't innately valuable -- it's valuable because it makes
critical thinking and problem solving easier. If you have a larger working
memory (because you've memorized lots of things before), you'll be able to
hold a larger system in your head to analyze.

Unfortunately, the educational system usually separates the memorization phase
from the problem-solving phase far too much to establish the causal link.
Using chemistry as an example, I think the (incorrect) reasoning runs
something like this:

\- Most good chemists know the periodic table by heart.

\- Therefore, step 1 to being a good chemist is to memorize the entire
periodic table.

They have the best of intentions -- every field requires you to know some
basic concepts before you can start manipulating them. But when I took a math
class in college, we didn't start off by memorizing the definitions of groups,
rings, and fields. We just started doing proofs. Everyone learned the
definitions fairly quickly just as a side effect of looking them up often
enough to solve the problems. So the far better approach is just to memorize
"as needed," which also makes the memories more likely to stick around in the
brain.

A final example, using history: Originally, I detested it as a subject solidly
in the "memorization" category. But I finally got a teacher who forced it into
the problem-solving category. Her exams were essays, where we had to write a
position paper arguing for a specific side of a political debate. This
immediately made those random memorized facts useful, because they could be
brought in to support a larger conceptual argument. This teacher was somewhat
of a local hero for her incredibly high passing rates -- her students actually
learned history, while others merely memorized assorted facts.

