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The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

nautil.us

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Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#81

Post by emanuelev »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #68

I liked this article because it was in direct opposition to my beliefs (based on my own experience) and yet it gave me a different point of view and convinced me that there was some truth and value there. I grew up in an era when we wasted a lot of time on mindless rote repetition of meaningless things (meaningless because we were not taught to understand them, only to repeat them). It was boring and useless. I learn…

Agreed. I think that's the key, you learn by first grasping a basic understanding of a concept and then reinforcing it through application repetition. But the initial understanding is absolutely vital, otherwise chances are you end-up in the mindless rote repetition you mentioned.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#82

Post by smartbit »

Rule #5: Repeat to remember. http://www.brainrules.net/short-term-memory

Rule #6: Remember to repeat. http://www.brainrules.net/long-term-memory

From John Medina's book Brainrules. Highly recommended, translates scientific research into an accessible style. The videos are very humorous eg Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes :-D (1:40) http://brainrules.net/brain-rules-video

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#83

Post by agumonkey »

noobermin wrote: post #15
tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

I remember first learning Quantum Field Theory. One week, my head would ache from what I was reading but by the next week, that bit would be incorporated into new parts, so the "confusing stuff" become foundation for the next week's confusing stuff. Eventually, it became intuitive.

Anybody experienced the opposite ? first time I was exposed to combinatorics everything felt natural and intuitive. The following lesson everything had become a blur.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#84

Post by lolive »

danso wrote: post #10
tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.

Especially in our modern time where our mind spends its time curating zillion of tiny messages to extract meaningful messages.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#85

Post by throwaway729 »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #45
westoncb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're talking about the relative delta in the conceptual structures between languages you already know and the language you're learning I don't think so. In both of my examples, the one from mathematics and the one from Russian, language is used as a way of representing some concepts—now, the language itself also has concepts underlying it, but these are about grammatical structures, lexicon, etc.—not about the su…

You've outlined my point exactly: you're comparing a case of learning language concepts to a case of learning language and subject concepts. Of course one of those is easier, but it doesn't mean that the two processes are fundamentally dissimilar, which was your initial point. Your comment is no more insightful than to say that it's easier to learn set theory knowing category theory than it is to learn English while…

> Nonsense comparison

Uh-huh. From the original post you're responding to:

I think the error arises from making an overly strong identification between learning a foreign language and learning mathematics

i.e. the parent's criticism is that the author of the article makes exactly the mistake you're claiming parent made...

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#86

Post by BaronSamedi »

bsder wrote: post #39
tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

While I tend to agree with the thesis, personal anecdote does not make a valid conclusion. We probably have decent research on this at this point. Anybody versed in it weighing it?

There is a whole field in cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory, devoted to this topic. One element of learning theory that may be of interest to HN readers is their notion of a "schema" (not an RDBMS schema). Schemas are the networked data structures in the brain (based ultimately on the underlying physical brain structure--neurons, regions, etc.) There is some interesting work in how schemas are acquired, primarily through imitation and repetition (which is what you would expect when training a neural network).

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#87

Post by throwaway729 »

johnnyhillbilly wrote: post #36
westoncb wrote: post #12

The author is arguing that 'the latest wave of educational reform in mathematics' (in the U.S.) is overemphasizing conceptual understanding, and that doing so will be damaging to students. The author advocates instead using a memorization and repetition based approach. I can see where she's coming from, but the argument she is making is flawed. She describes a process for developing fluency both in foreign language a…

Didn't this turn out a bit of a straw man? As far as I understand, she advocates an understanding of the concepts complemented by some appropriate type of repetition. There is also a third concept: That of imagining. She speaks specifically of one equation in classical mechanics, which she played around with in her mind until it became second nature. Of course, this is based on her experience. It appeals to me based…

> yet it isn't a showcasing of scientific rigour within pedagogics.

I think this is exactly the correct criticism of this and most other critiques of mathematics curricula. It's ironic to see a huge conversation about mathematics pedagogy that never goes and looks at the data.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#88

Post by JadeNB »

noobermin wrote: post #25
sevenless wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you learn quantum field theory? I took a tiny amount of QM in school - basically, solving the Schrodinger equation for a few simple systems. What's the next step?

I read Shrednicki[0]'s book, a pre-print is freely available online (or was 4 or so years ago). A class in Grad school solidified it for me, specifically because they related it back to physics, like the standard model. If you're going to start learning QFT, I suggest you try to understand time-dependent perturbation theory as much as possible. Also, be sure you have a handle on special relativity and scattering theo…

For what it's worth, that PDF says "Please DO NOT DISTRIBUTE this document. Instead, link to http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/∼mark/qft.html " (which has a link to the PDF).

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#89

Post by r_smart »

danso wrote: post #10
tucaz wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things. I like the message, but not the messenger. Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste. The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way with…

A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.

I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter are summarized in a sentence. The bulk of the chapters is mostly just stories.

Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses.

So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point.

I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.

Re: The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

#90

Post by erroneousfunk »

westoncb wrote: post #12

The author is arguing that 'the latest wave of educational reform in mathematics' (in the U.S.) is overemphasizing conceptual understanding, and that doing so will be damaging to students. The author advocates instead using a memorization and repetition based approach. I can see where she's coming from, but the argument she is making is flawed. She describes a process for developing fluency both in foreign language a…

Interesting that you should use the phrase "I went to the store"... I took Russian for two years in college, and, while I can get around Moscow alright, ask for directions, and exchange a few sentences of banter with Russian speakers I meet at parties, I'm hardly fluent. But the phrase "I went to the store" could be constructed in a HUGE number of ways in Russian, as there is no word in Russian that simply means "went" or "go" like we have in English.

Did you go to the store and come back? Was it a unidirectional journey? Do you go to the store often? Did you drive to the store? Did you walk to the store? Did you go inside the store? Did you obtain the endpoint of store as a goal?

The phrase " went to " can be (and, indeed must be -- no easy outs) conjugated and declined in so many freaking ways in Russian, with subtle meanings encoded in those conjugations and declensions, it's nuts.

I used to be great at the verbs of motion a long time ago, but, because I haven't been religiously practicing and thinking about them, I just avoid them altogether at this point. (The last time I tried saying "Are you driving to Boston?" I accidentally said "Are you wandering around aimlessly in Boston by car?")

My point though, is that I would argue that there is a very good reason to think deeply about the sentence "I went to the store" in Russian, and think deeply about all of the ways you can say it, modify it, and replace its component parts to achieve different meanings, and how those meanings relate to the meanings of other sentences containing the same component parts. I certainly wish I had done that more often!

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