I don't see how teaching the motivations, history, context, and future uses of the current topic of study on Mondays (while using the other four days for more t

I don't see how teaching the motivations, history, context, and future uses of the current topic of study on Mondays (while using the other four days for more traditional teaching) would be significantly worse than what we do now. It actually sounds a lot better. > If students are going to succeed in his college-level courses then they need the basics down cold, which means memorization, repetition, and application to concrete problems Further, the only time I ever needed it "down cold" was when college professors were insisting I not use a calculator on exams. The rest of the time, I was better off knowing about the context and motivation behind what we were doing, not calculating faster. This experience is shared by friends of mine who are now pursuing PhDs in the hard sciences or working in finance: the computer does the calculating, but you need to know how to write mathematics, not how to manipulate numbers (by hand).