6 ms·

> In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What

by mlyle 4y ago

> In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Some schooling focuses way too much on rote, memorization, etc. But........ IMO, we often get the main point of education wrong. It's not so much direct transfer of useful skills or a body of information-- though these are still important. Instead, I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals. On a limited basis, practicing the skill of memorizing poetry and reciting it to a class can be a useful exercise. Now you know you can do that, how to do it, and about how long it's going to take. You were also forced to engage with that particular content in a deeper way than a casual, unmotivated reading by a high school student would have resulted in: the overall cadence and structure is cemented in your head as much as the very words. Education used to be very memorization and recitation heavy. Leaving a little bit in seems useful, even though it was the kind of thing I hated most as a kid.

dylan604 4y ago
I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared to other people's opinion of their schooling. The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did this. The history/literature classes were all rote memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do well in them. However, the other classes where I learned how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a self-learner". I can read subject material a few times, experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function. Practice and continued use makes for much better retention than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with SO searches.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I noticed an interesting effect in college that other graduates I talked with noticed, too. One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn more efficiently.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Yes. Also, though, often you have a body of understanding that can be coerced to just handle the new task. Over in microeconomics... we draw budget curves, and all the operations on budget curves are a whole lot like operations on production possibility curves, so there's a lot of skill transfer. We spent 2 class periods on PPCs, and 10 minutes on budget curves. My students better understand how to learn economic concepts, and they have a closely related skill that they can adjust for the new task. Every lesson, we're accelerating.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Yes, the crossover effect is quite real. I remember my econ class, where the textbook spend a lot of time deriving derivative calculus. Except they never mentioned the words "derivative" or "calculus", because evidently that triggered math anxiety in econ students. So the book went around the horn doing it the hard way, using different terms like "marginal rate of return". Me, I had a good chuckle over that. I kept all my college textbooks except the econ one, which went in the trash.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        That's one way that I'm hamstrung by the College Board. All of my students know or are taking a calculus course (and those that are, are past the limit definition of the derivative by this point). I would rather be teaching this material with calculus and not just handwaving and saying "the marginal revenue curve is twice as steep as the demand curve!" But they're going to pass an examination where it's all done algebraically and visually. [I DO THINK there's some value in taking these algebraic and visual approaches, but there comes a point in the class where they get rather awkward].
quacked 4y ago
You may enjoy this: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://nursingabc.com/upload/documents/Other_course_documents/SevenLessons.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiZsN_qz576AhWgKkQIHVJWC0wQFnoECBMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw23GWkDN3ftPfbZCWiCedYw https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
- mlyle 4y ago
  :D I've come across it before, but thanks for refreshing my memory of it. So, for background, I am now a teacher. This year, I'm teaching: * Middle School: Competitive math (MathCounts), Competitive robotics (FTC), Intro to Circuits (undergraduate EE curriculum slightly simplified and slowed down), Mechatronics Lab (3D design, embedded software, and controls). * High School: AP Microeconomics (College level economics course), Competitive robotics (FTC), Spacecraft Systems Engineering (hoping to get a launch grant to put a small satellite in orbit). * Clubs: HS Investment club, HS Space club, upper elementary math and robotics clubs. I'm all about things being student led and student owned; this is especially true in my team classes (robotics and math). Even the others, I try to attain this to the extent possible. On the other hand... Look, we've got a few hundred bodies around. We need a bell and to know where students should be. And my students do need to learn to work on things that are not necessarily their first choice of what to do, because for a lot of students this would be Fortnite 24/7. And for a lot of subject, there are pieces of information that are useless on their own until you've built a whole conceptual loop around them. The piece makes an argument for market forces. Unfortunately, market forces often push things in the "wrong" direction. Parents want their kids to take lots of AP classes because it is helpful to get into college and also saves college tuition. But I feel like the microeconomics course I'm teaching is a lot worse than the one I'd teach on my own... I dare not stray too much from the dictates of the College Board, though, because students need to pass that test. Parents also like "rigor" of students working meekly and quietly because it seems like it's a quality signal (and it often is, but too much of anything is crap!). What we really need is: * Rigorous, controlled educational research so that we can know what works and what doesn't in what populations. Spoiler: everyone is just making it all up as they go along or, at best, following new educational trends with very little research support for them * An educational system that actually respects and implements that research. * Respect, safety, and adequate resources for teachers. (I do extraordinary things with my classes in large part I teach in a very easy environment-- from class sizes, organizational support, resourcing, and student behavior).
webmobdev 4y ago
Yes, I too have come to this realization too. I too hated memorising something as I didn't consider it an "intellectual" task. But you are right that it is a necessary part of education to train kids. Indeed, now when I look at some professions as an adult - like the Indian administrative services (civil service bureaucrats), doctors, lawyers etc - I understand why the ability and skill to learn some fact quickly and retain it in memory is highly valued in such professions.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  you dont even need to go to administrators. i worked as a cashier in high school amd some items just never scanned. the ability to memorize the upc codes for those items improved my metrics a ton. when i studied engineering i also memorized commom values to speed up problem solving. I think everyone does it to some degree. Some deliberate practice while you're developing basic skills isn't a bad thing imho.
Fricken 4y ago
> I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals. I was taught obedience and how to follow instructions in school (and didn't learn it very well). Being discliplined, systemic, learning new things, and challenging myself are what I was always getting in shit for.
Valakas_ 4y ago
I read these rationalizations a lot. "What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playing chess teaches you how to plan and think." Well no. These were never mentioned as the goal. If the goal is to learn how to study, how to memorize, how to learn, then present it a so, focus on it. The goal of memorizing the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English, definitely wasn't to learn how to memorize. Maybe that was a secondary or tertiary goal. It definitely would never be mentioned as a goal in itself. It seems like now that we had to invest our time in close to useless things, we try to find reasons why it wasn't so useless. School is extremely inefficient. I studied way, but WAY more things I'll never use, or want to use in my life again than the opposite. Education nowadays is like using a shotgun to kill an insect. One thing that's good in software engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields is that it's maybe more focused and applied. But in Mechanical, I studied so much stuff, and now I use less than 5% of it. And the argument that I hear from my colleagues "Oh but you learned how to do complicated math, how to study hard, and understand difficult concepts" just doesn't stick. It's been shown that this kind of training helps you at that task, and little else. From a 2016 review by Simons et al: “We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.” See https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-doesnt-work/?ck_subscriber_id=389192016 https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-d...
- mlyle 4y ago
  > These were never mentioned as the goal. I teach, among other things, robotics classes. I'm rather explicit that students will learn things about kinematics and mechanical construction, programming, etc. But that these are also the easy parts. The class is really about organization, project management, dispute resolution, and time management. It's about being systematic and making small changes and figuring out where to pitch in to improve the team's progress. And yah, there's a lot of time spent studying and memorizing rules in a rulebook. Because it helps our performance in our season... and because learning and juggling lots of requirements is stuff students will likely have to do later. Most of these students will never use inverse kinematics again. It's the "hook" that interests them right now and gets them to practice the other things. They definitely will not use the FIRST rulebook again. But I feel like the students are learning a lot of the things that helped me solve real world engineering problems and complete large projects successfully. > From a 2016 review by Simons et al: Why do you link a review about the effects of brain-training on adults? It's very well documented that practice in memorization improves performance at memorization tasks (both similar and unrelated) in children and young adults. This is some of the earliest rigorous ed-psych material we have that is also some of the most durable and well-reproduced.. e.g. this paper from 1932. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 It's a bit silly of an argument here. Do you understand just how much humans develop ability to e.g. memorize musical passages and texts by memorization practice? I don't think it should be a primary thing we "train" in youth, but it's probably not great to neglect it completely, either. Here, memorizing poetry is all about building an efficient encoding for its structure. Learning the poetry's structure is a primary aim. Getting good at memorizing small passages of text to be able to recite them is a secondary goal (and a useful one).

by mlyle 4y ago

dylan604 4y ago

I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared to other people's opinion of their schooling. The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did this. The history/literature classes were all rote memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do well in them. However, the other classes where I learned how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a self-learner". I can read subject material a few times, experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function. Practice and continued use makes for much better retention than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with SO searches.

WalterBright 4y ago
I noticed an interesting effect in college that other graduates I talked with noticed, too. One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn more efficiently.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Yes. Also, though, often you have a body of understanding that can be coerced to just handle the new task. Over in microeconomics... we draw budget curves, and all the operations on budget curves are a whole lot like operations on production possibility curves, so there's a lot of skill transfer. We spent 2 class periods on PPCs, and 10 minutes on budget curves. My students better understand how to learn economic concepts, and they have a closely related skill that they can adjust for the new task. Every lesson, we're accelerating.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yes, the crossover effect is quite real. I remember my econ class, where the textbook spend a lot of time deriving derivative calculus. Except they never mentioned the words "derivative" or "calculus", because evidently that triggered math anxiety in econ students. So the book went around the horn doing it the hard way, using different terms like "marginal rate of return". Me, I had a good chuckle over that. I kept all my college textbooks except the econ one, which went in the trash.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      That's one way that I'm hamstrung by the College Board. All of my students know or are taking a calculus course (and those that are, are past the limit definition of the derivative by this point). I would rather be teaching this material with calculus and not just handwaving and saying "the marginal revenue curve is twice as steep as the demand curve!" But they're going to pass an examination where it's all done algebraically and visually. [I DO THINK there's some value in taking these algebraic and visual approaches, but there comes a point in the class where they get rather awkward].

quacked 4y ago

You may enjoy this: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://nursingabc.com/upload/documents/Other_course_documents/SevenLessons.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiZsN_qz576AhWgKkQIHVJWC0wQFnoECBMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw23GWkDN3ftPfbZCWiCedYw https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

mlyle 4y ago
:D I've come across it before, but thanks for refreshing my memory of it. So, for background, I am now a teacher. This year, I'm teaching: * Middle School: Competitive math (MathCounts), Competitive robotics (FTC), Intro to Circuits (undergraduate EE curriculum slightly simplified and slowed down), Mechatronics Lab (3D design, embedded software, and controls). * High School: AP Microeconomics (College level economics course), Competitive robotics (FTC), Spacecraft Systems Engineering (hoping to get a launch grant to put a small satellite in orbit). * Clubs: HS Investment club, HS Space club, upper elementary math and robotics clubs. I'm all about things being student led and student owned; this is especially true in my team classes (robotics and math). Even the others, I try to attain this to the extent possible. On the other hand... Look, we've got a few hundred bodies around. We need a bell and to know where students should be. And my students do need to learn to work on things that are not necessarily their first choice of what to do, because for a lot of students this would be Fortnite 24/7. And for a lot of subject, there are pieces of information that are useless on their own until you've built a whole conceptual loop around them. The piece makes an argument for market forces. Unfortunately, market forces often push things in the "wrong" direction. Parents want their kids to take lots of AP classes because it is helpful to get into college and also saves college tuition. But I feel like the microeconomics course I'm teaching is a lot worse than the one I'd teach on my own... I dare not stray too much from the dictates of the College Board, though, because students need to pass that test. Parents also like "rigor" of students working meekly and quietly because it seems like it's a quality signal (and it often is, but too much of anything is crap!). What we really need is: * Rigorous, controlled educational research so that we can know what works and what doesn't in what populations. Spoiler: everyone is just making it all up as they go along or, at best, following new educational trends with very little research support for them * An educational system that actually respects and implements that research. * Respect, safety, and adequate resources for teachers. (I do extraordinary things with my classes in large part I teach in a very easy environment-- from class sizes, organizational support, resourcing, and student behavior).

webmobdev 4y ago

Yes, I too have come to this realization too. I too hated memorising something as I didn't consider it an "intellectual" task. But you are right that it is a necessary part of education to train kids. Indeed, now when I look at some professions as an adult - like the Indian administrative services (civil service bureaucrats), doctors, lawyers etc - I understand why the ability and skill to learn some fact quickly and retain it in memory is highly valued in such professions.

LegitShady 4y ago
you dont even need to go to administrators. i worked as a cashier in high school amd some items just never scanned. the ability to memorize the upc codes for those items improved my metrics a ton. when i studied engineering i also memorized commom values to speed up problem solving. I think everyone does it to some degree. Some deliberate practice while you're developing basic skills isn't a bad thing imho.

Fricken 4y ago

> I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals. I was taught obedience and how to follow instructions in school (and didn't learn it very well). Being discliplined, systemic, learning new things, and challenging myself are what I was always getting in shit for.

Valakas_ 4y ago

I read these rationalizations a lot. "What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playing chess teaches you how to plan and think." Well no. These were never mentioned as the goal. If the goal is to learn how to study, how to memorize, how to learn, then present it a so, focus on it. The goal of memorizing the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English, definitely wasn't to learn how to memorize. Maybe that was a secondary or tertiary goal. It definitely would never be mentioned as a goal in itself. It seems like now that we had to invest our time in close to useless things, we try to find reasons why it wasn't so useless. School is extremely inefficient. I studied way, but WAY more things I'll never use, or want to use in my life again than the opposite. Education nowadays is like using a shotgun to kill an insect. One thing that's good in software engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields is that it's maybe more focused and applied. But in Mechanical, I studied so much stuff, and now I use less than 5% of it. And the argument that I hear from my colleagues "Oh but you learned how to do complicated math, how to study hard, and understand difficult concepts" just doesn't stick. It's been shown that this kind of training helps you at that task, and little else. From a 2016 review by Simons et al: “We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.” See https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-doesnt-work/?ck_subscriber_id=389192016 https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-d...

mlyle 4y ago
> These were never mentioned as the goal. I teach, among other things, robotics classes. I'm rather explicit that students will learn things about kinematics and mechanical construction, programming, etc. But that these are also the easy parts. The class is really about organization, project management, dispute resolution, and time management. It's about being systematic and making small changes and figuring out where to pitch in to improve the team's progress. And yah, there's a lot of time spent studying and memorizing rules in a rulebook. Because it helps our performance in our season... and because learning and juggling lots of requirements is stuff students will likely have to do later. Most of these students will never use inverse kinematics again. It's the "hook" that interests them right now and gets them to practice the other things. They definitely will not use the FIRST rulebook again. But I feel like the students are learning a lot of the things that helped me solve real world engineering problems and complete large projects successfully. > From a 2016 review by Simons et al: Why do you link a review about the effects of brain-training on adults? It's very well documented that practice in memorization improves performance at memorization tasks (both similar and unrelated) in children and young adults. This is some of the earliest rigorous ed-psych material we have that is also some of the most durable and well-reproduced.. e.g. this paper from 1932. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 It's a bit silly of an argument here. Do you understand just how much humans develop ability to e.g. memorize musical passages and texts by memorization practice? I don't think it should be a primary thing we "train" in youth, but it's probably not great to neglect it completely, either. Here, memorizing poetry is all about building an efficient encoding for its structure. Learning the poetry's structure is a primary aim. Getting good at memorizing small passages of text to be able to recite them is a secondary goal (and a useful one).