4 ms·

I tend to take the understand-don't-memorize approach to stuff as well. It's served me well in general, but it's also why I nearly failed micro-biology in high

• wenc 8y ago
  > understand-don't-memorize approach I hear you. This is actually an oversimplification that is received wisdom among American students and educators (often used as an argument against the rote-learning tendencies of non-Western education systems, which are the other extreme), but in practice it is wrong in its basic articulation. This was an article on HN awhile ago about using Anki to read the literature of an entire field or subfield [1], but it also touches on the role of memory in learning. Without memory, it's hard to see deep connections across vast areas of knowledge. You can't always "look things up" if you don't know if those things exist. [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html