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> The way that math is taught to most people is absolutely atrocious, involving rote memorization, following rules for the sake of following rules, very little
by sdfghswe 3y ago
> The way that math is taught to most people is absolutely atrocious, involving rote memorization, following rules for the sake of following rules, very little intuition involved.
The older I get the more I realize the importance of memorization if you want to _actually_ apply maths to solve problems, as opposed to learning for the pleasure of it. When I was a kid I was all about the ideas.
- Kranar 3y agoSo there is definitely a subtlety here, which is not that memorization is bad in and of itself, but that learning things by memorizing them is a very short term strategy for actual understanding. For example I use math on an almost daily basis working as a quant, and so yes I happen to have memorized a great deal of math. But that memorization did not happen by sitting and explicitly memorizing things, memorizing formulas, memorizing rules or procedures or theorems. The memorization came over time and through repeated usage naturally. But the way math is taught at school, students are kind of pushed into a corner where if they want to do well on the test, the quiz, the exams then the path of least resistance is to memorize a narrow set of specific "material" that will be tested and then hyper fixating on that material by employing memorization.
- xigoi 3y agoYou should memorize things by using them, not by specifically sitting down to memorize them.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoWhich is easy to say if it's something you use a lot. But many things are just stepping stones to, or the fundamentals of, the part you do use a lot. I never gave it much thought in school, but I'm glad we did things like memorize multiplication tables. Being able to instantly know all multiplications of numbers up to 12 makes reasoning about numbers much faster.
- xigoi 3y agoIf you don't use something a lot, then don't memorize it.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoI'd have never learned anything in math past arithmetic if that were the case.
- sdfghswe 3y agoRecipe for being mediocre right here.
- allarm 3y agoBullshit. It's totally the opposite.