I went through K-12 in a different East European country, and it was mostly all drills and rote memorization. Our history teacher would read his notes, which w

I went through K-12 in a different East European country, and it was mostly all drills and rote memorization. Our history teacher would read his notes, which would have a paragraph on any given subtopic (battle/kingdom/person). About 4 times a semester he would do oral exams, which took about 2 periods to go through 30 kids, so about 3 minutes per person. His question was one or two words which was the title of the topic, and we were expected to recite the paragraph from his notes word for word. Each word wrong one grade point down. We might as well have been reciting digits of pi. Overall the most useful studying technique I took away from this is math drills, which came in handy even in a run of the mill American university; the trick is to just do the same kind of problem over and over again until you internalize the intuition; it's kind of the wax-on-wax-off learning something you don't realize you're learning until a while after all the work is put in. I've no idea what to do for my kid when time comes. I don't want her to drill stupid, but I would like her to learn to work hard.