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In Praise of Memorization
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Re: In Praise of Memorization
#102Disclaimer: Anecdata. I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization. Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same r…
There is a lot of evidence that I think backs up your anecdata. For example Massachusetts has the highest performing public school system in the US (arguably, but by many measures) and their curriculum is based on the content heavy Core Curriculum (not to be confused with the watered down Common Core) created by E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch was a college professor and his argument is that knowledge is a significant portion of literacy, he witnessed this first hand trying to teach college freshman that simply didn't have the background knowledge to understand the college level books Hirsch was teaching, even though they had no problem reading the words. Hirsch's books "Cultural Literacy" and "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" go into detail about this and he has some essays available online that are worth reading.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#103Memorization also forces you to "reduce dimensionality" in the data—find the underlying patterns of correlation and causality that cause the world to be structured the way it is. You can't feasibly fit every single event in the history of every country in the world into your head, but it becomes a lot more feasible once you extract a narrative that explains the data effectively.
Memorization implicitly requires learning and characterizing them entirely separately as modern education does is pretty faulty.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#104You know those fancy electronic notebooks? They're barely better than actual notebooks. They all seek to emulate the pen and paper experience, they go to great expense and make it a focus of their advertising that they feel like real pen and paper. Why wouldn't I just use pen and paper? I believe electronic notebooks haven't yet realized their greatest potential, spaced repetition. I want to take my notes in an elect…
If you have an Android device, AnkiDroid 2.16 (currently in alpha) has basic drawing functionality [0].
Image Occlusion is available via a third-party app[1]:
The app is open to pull requests (raise an issue/pop into chat), and provides an API which allows external apps to create cards.
[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/releases
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.infinyte7.ankiimageocclus...
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#105Disclaimer: Anecdata. I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization. Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same r…
>The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization....
>But the students who struggle all struggle for the same reason: they cannot remember at the moment of writing their paper the basic facts that give context or even give meaning to the documents they are to analyze.
It sounds like what you're describing isn't about students' ability to memorize, but rather about students' ability to develop their own mental models. Luquet and Piaget demonstrated that the ability to synthesize information to develop mental models isn't particularly connected to the ability to memorize the same information.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anki (or similar). Spaced repetition is the most underrated tool I know of. And I barely use it: 8 cards per day, probably 1.5 minutes total with a noticeable bump in ease of professional life
Ah.. I thought it was more of so you could practice remembering stuff. Like some people remembers what somebody said in a meeting 3 months ago and some don’t even knew we had a meeting about it
You can 100% use spaces repetition for that. Just depends on what facts you want to spend time committing to long term memory.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#107I get the impression that memorization fell out of favor in education
because in the past, it was used as an ends in itself
rather than a tool to generate insight.
In school, my dad had to memorize a lot of dates with precision down to the day. That seems mostly-useless to me. Just knowing the decade is sufficient for most analysis. To take the article's example, the putative link between "Row v. Wade (1973) → Downswing in crime since the 1990s" only really requires that you know that the ruling occurred sometime in the 70s.
I think the strategy, then, should be to memorize things that are likely to generate insights and to the level of precision that will likely be necessary to do so. You should probably commit to memory that Andrew Johnson was the president after Lincoln in 1860s -- but you probably don't need to remember that Millard Fillmore succeeded Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's some stuff about how The Art of Memory, Memory Palaces, and the Method of Loci relate to adventure-like games, and some apps I developed along those lines, which I discussed with Scott Adams when he dropped by HN (the kind and brilliant old school text adventure game developer, not to be confused with the terrible Trump loving misogynistic troll and right wing nut job cartoonist who was outed for using sock pu…
I think the most hilarious part of the Scott Adams (Dilbert) saga to me is that he bothered to sockpuppet on METAFILTER.
The troll Scott Adams' unintentional humor is much more hilarious, revealing, and reflective of reality than any of his intentional humor or cartoons.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#109I've never regarded memorization highly. Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them. Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually. I'm of the opinion that this leads…
I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths. After having studied maths and physics at university and worked as a programmer in a mathematical field for 20 years (and studied much more…
> I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths.
Isn't the structure of the school curriculum also at fault here? If concepts like the quadratic formula being presented without context on why you will need to memorize them, and you're able to succeed without doing it, it's clear why you might choose not to memorize it. That wouldn't be the case if they presented you with challenging, applied problems where having the quadratic formula memorized really is actually necessary.
The curriculum seems to be structured under the assumption that the students will memorize the facts for the sake of memorizing (as most students do) in order to get good grades, and only later apply them on more advanced classes. If you're able to derive the results fast enough, and as such you see no point in memorizing them, then that assumption is broken, and the curriculum won't work the way it is expected to. Those students would need to take initiative themselves to adapt their learning style to the way books and classes are structured, as it's not obvious for them that such memorization is necessary.
Re: In Praise of Memorization
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd claim (perhaps not even contrary to what you're saying) that memorization and competent analysis/understanding are really two sides of the same coin. "Here is some long sentence that doesn't really say anything and which you've probably never read in your life before." You could now probably recite that sentence with near perfect accuracy; at worse changing it in very slight ways that are still functionally ident…
This is fantastic! And a method I teach to students who I find to be narratively inclined. Works wonders, and is similar to my main method of memorization of historical facts.
The opening epigraph of the textbook used by my AP Euro teacher still sticks with me 15 years later: "good history is a well-told story". Teaching the cause-and-effect greatly eases the memorization. Even if you do not remember which year Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door, knowing it happened after the voyages of Columbus helps point you to the correct year.