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Personally, I'm starting to identify a lot of cases where looking things up in an external resource is a deeper mental disruption than remembering it, even if t

by dkarl 5y ago

Personally, I'm starting to identify a lot of cases where looking things up in an external resource is a deeper mental disruption than remembering it, even if the lookup is just as fast or even faster. (Or, it's possible that the external lookup only seems faster because the several mechanical steps compress my perception of time, like keyboard navigation can seem faster than the mouse, even when it isn't.) For example, I find that when I'm working with an API enough that I am frequently looking up the same operations, investing twenty minutes in identifying and reviewing the important operations, as if I were preparing for an exam where I wouldn't be allowed to consult external resources, pays off in fluency and immersion. Another example is that when I am reading a history book, before I start, I review relevant names and contemporary dates. Then when I find myself thinking, "Wait, at this time, how long ago was X? Has Y happened yet?" I can answer from memory. This gives me a richer reading experience than if I needed to remove myself from the context of the book to look up those dates. I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer.

Jtsummers 5y ago
> I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m... - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular this sentence: > I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. [emphasis in original] I'll emphasize isolated fact. A lot of people who say memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They (mostly, there are exceptions) aren't arguing against committing information to memory, but of committing information to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it. If you just learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from what you know, determine new results). The author talks about students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they actually know, though? What can they do with that fact on its own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and the contexts in which it is used?
- dkarl 5y ago
  Yep, defining memorization as learning "isolated" facts presupposes that the teacher is too lazy to draw connections in the classroom and explain the relevance of what the students are learning. It defines memorization as something that only an incompetent teacher would utilize, like defining engagement with primary sources as having students read material in dense technical or archaic language they don't understand, without assistance, or defining classroom discussion as asking the students to talk about the material and then going to the teacher's lounge to have a cup of coffee. No teacher would defend the use of techniques framed that way.
kaetemi 5y ago
Yep. Having to look up every API call, versus taking the time to memorise the (relevant parts of the) API, makes the difference if you want to be a 10x coder. Knowing how to look up and apply things is nice. Being able to discern which of the things you looked up are worth memorising, and then actually doing so, is even better.
_Nat_ 5y ago
You're using [pre-fetching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetching): looking up information that you expect may be needed in advance. And it's also reasonable to retain such cached information over the term in which you expect it to be reasonably in-demand. By contrast, the critique of rote-memorization in education is that students have their time/effort/educational-opportunity squandered in courses that ask them to memorize information incongruent with expected utility. For example, kids had been asked to remember elements of a fictional narrative, or specific dates or factoids about historical trivia. It's more of an issue of (cache/memory)-management and when/what information ought to be retained rather than an issue of memorization always being good/bad. Generally, the critique of education is that students ought to be learning how to think and operate rather than memorizing trivia. Of course, learning to operate effectively can involve memorization at times, e.g. retaining an appropriately-tuned working-cache of relevant information, though exams that basically force students to waste their time/effort/opportunity memorizing trivia seem counter-productive. --- Hard to explain this, but it's important, so... I think one of the worst parts of rote-memorization in education is that it messes up the mind's internal prioritization scheme, which I think makes people stupid. For example, when someone's doing a math-problem, they need to remember the numbers that they're working with; such things ought to be retained in the term in which they're used, as required to do a math-problem. For another example, when someone's studying a historical-happening, they need to remember dates, names, and so forth, well enough to piece it together. Though like with math, they ought to be able to write such things down or look them up, as appropriate; there's no value to memorization that goes beyond its utility in caching. So, when a teacher asks their students to memorize dates, it's not that they're wrong in the notion that a good-student ought to, at some point, have memorized the very things they're asking the students to memorize. Instead, the teacher's big screw-up is that they're asking students to elevate such minutia from cache-trivia to deliverables. Alternatively, they're asking students to treat their mental-cache AS a deliverable. And that's what I fear would make people stupid, because that's not how a healthy mind would seem to operate. This is, a healthy mind ought to have an efficient, tuned cache-management system; it's a mental-sickness to try to train one's cache to reliably operate over the course of days or weeks, as students had sometimes been asked to to regurgitate trivia on an exam. Instead, a healthy mind ought to have an internal feel for when/how trivia is useful, then retain it accordingly. And a healthy mind shouldn't be obsessed with a fear of failing an exam for forgetting something; that'd be like designing a CPU around the ideal that a cache-miss is a critical-error. In short, I'm trying to stress that it's not as simple an issue as memorization always being good/bad, but rather it's an issue of rote-memorization training students to engage in poor mental-hygiene practices, messing up their ability to think efficiently. (Obviously, this is in addition to the normal objection that students end up missing out on a real education.)
onemoresoop 5y ago
Some things are worth memorizing, others aren't and just just remembering a reference does the trick. Also memorizing information that becomes obsolete fast becomes a hinderance rather quickly.

by dkarl 5y ago

Jtsummers 5y ago

> I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m... - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular this sentence: > I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. [emphasis in original] I'll emphasize isolated fact. A lot of people who say memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They (mostly, there are exceptions) aren't arguing against committing information to memory, but of committing information to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it. If you just learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from what you know, determine new results). The author talks about students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they actually know, though? What can they do with that fact on its own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and the contexts in which it is used?

dkarl 5y ago
Yep, defining memorization as learning "isolated" facts presupposes that the teacher is too lazy to draw connections in the classroom and explain the relevance of what the students are learning. It defines memorization as something that only an incompetent teacher would utilize, like defining engagement with primary sources as having students read material in dense technical or archaic language they don't understand, without assistance, or defining classroom discussion as asking the students to talk about the material and then going to the teacher's lounge to have a cup of coffee. No teacher would defend the use of techniques framed that way.

kaetemi 5y ago

Yep. Having to look up every API call, versus taking the time to memorise the (relevant parts of the) API, makes the difference if you want to be a 10x coder. Knowing how to look up and apply things is nice. Being able to discern which of the things you looked up are worth memorising, and then actually doing so, is even better.

_Nat_ 5y ago

You're using [pre-fetching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetching): looking up information that you expect may be needed in advance. And it's also reasonable to retain such cached information over the term in which you expect it to be reasonably in-demand. By contrast, the critique of rote-memorization in education is that students have their time/effort/educational-opportunity squandered in courses that ask them to memorize information incongruent with expected utility. For example, kids had been asked to remember elements of a fictional narrative, or specific dates or factoids about historical trivia. It's more of an issue of (cache/memory)-management and when/what information ought to be retained rather than an issue of memorization always being good/bad. Generally, the critique of education is that students ought to be learning how to think and operate rather than memorizing trivia. Of course, learning to operate effectively can involve memorization at times, e.g. retaining an appropriately-tuned working-cache of relevant information, though exams that basically force students to waste their time/effort/opportunity memorizing trivia seem counter-productive. --- Hard to explain this, but it's important, so... I think one of the worst parts of rote-memorization in education is that it messes up the mind's internal prioritization scheme, which I think makes people stupid. For example, when someone's doing a math-problem, they need to remember the numbers that they're working with; such things ought to be retained in the term in which they're used, as required to do a math-problem. For another example, when someone's studying a historical-happening, they need to remember dates, names, and so forth, well enough to piece it together. Though like with math, they ought to be able to write such things down or look them up, as appropriate; there's no value to memorization that goes beyond its utility in caching. So, when a teacher asks their students to memorize dates, it's not that they're wrong in the notion that a good-student ought to, at some point, have memorized the very things they're asking the students to memorize. Instead, the teacher's big screw-up is that they're asking students to elevate such minutia from cache-trivia to deliverables. Alternatively, they're asking students to treat their mental-cache AS a deliverable. And that's what I fear would make people stupid, because that's not how a healthy mind would seem to operate. This is, a healthy mind ought to have an efficient, tuned cache-management system; it's a mental-sickness to try to train one's cache to reliably operate over the course of days or weeks, as students had sometimes been asked to to regurgitate trivia on an exam. Instead, a healthy mind ought to have an internal feel for when/how trivia is useful, then retain it accordingly. And a healthy mind shouldn't be obsessed with a fear of failing an exam for forgetting something; that'd be like designing a CPU around the ideal that a cache-miss is a critical-error. In short, I'm trying to stress that it's not as simple an issue as memorization always being good/bad, but rather it's an issue of rote-memorization training students to engage in poor mental-hygiene practices, messing up their ability to think efficiently. (Obviously, this is in addition to the normal objection that students end up missing out on a real education.)

onemoresoop 5y ago

Some things are worth memorizing, others aren't and just just remembering a reference does the trick. Also memorizing information that becomes obsolete fast becomes a hinderance rather quickly.