> 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

> 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).