Ask HN: Why is school rote memorization?

The big question with the 'good college' route is, have you done what I did in HS: barely skate by, try not to get completely bored. If you have, then an early college is probably the only way you are going to get into a 'good college'. I had wonderfully high standardized test scores, IQ scores and a pretty run of the mill GPA. I can't imagine where I would have ended up if I had stayed in HS and ended up going to one of the 'large lecture hall' driven Universities that were in my future.

All that said, yes, a large portion of life is memorization... but if you are memorizing so you can put it to use solving problems, it becomes fun. if you are memorizing just so you can pass a test, it isn't quite so much fun... plus once the tests are over, reference books exist.

2) You need to know (by rote) an incredible amount of random things to get by in daily life. To be a professional, you need all of them and more, plus an incredible amount of domain-specific knowledge.

If you don't think #2 is correct, try learning an Asian language. Since there are very few similar words, you'll have to learn all of that random crap in the new language and you'll suddenly realize how much school has prepared you for life.

(Asian because it's totally different than European languages. If we were typing in an Asian language, I'd suggest a European language instead.)

If? Finish high school!

Okay, tough love time: you are not the only person here who things school sucks - you know why? Because school often does indeed suck. But it's not forever. Yes, ideally school should be a great educational platform but yes, sometimes you are stuck with third-rate teachers whose only interest in teaching is to make you memorise stuff.

But guess what: being able to memorise stuff is not a bad skill. Being able to do something that sucks in exchange for a future pay off (doing Comp Sci if that is what you want) is absolutely a good skill.

I don't think anybody here would lack sympathy for your situation, but you can't change your lousy school - you can only change yourself. Try and battle burnout by challenging yourself - The Internet Is Your Friend (tm). If you are being forced to memorise history dates, find a historical novel that deals with the period and read it. If you are forced to memorise math/physics formulas, find some of the great teachers online and work through their material (eg. check out http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ ).

Hang in there. No, all of life is not like that. But, life is what you make it.

Dr NakaMats who has invented a huge number of incredible things recommends memorization as an important part of preparation for what he calls Ikispiration. http://www.whatagreatidea.com/nakamatsu.htm

Here's an excerpt from an interview: What are the teaching methods used to prepare Japanese children for the strong competition they face? And how does this affect creativity?

NakaMats:

One method is memorization. We teach our kids to memorize until the age of twenty, for we have discovered that the human brain needs memorization up to that point. Then young people can begin free-associating, putting everything together. That’s how geniuses are formed. If a child doesn’t learn how to memorize effectively, he doesn’t reach his full potential.

Instead, memorize and keep! The more you know, the more opportunities you'll have for things to bang together, make sparks and create a fire in your belly. Oddly enough, this can be true even of history or grammar, although it's impossible to predict how.

Don't simply memorize, though. Work out for yourself how things fit together. School is giving you this opportunity, but you need to take the chance.

Why is grammar important?

See these two Youtube videos by Lisa VanDamme of VanDamme Academy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsYMr7VriYE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxnI84C_gWo

You can get Rex Barks, which she references in the videos, here: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1889439355/

Why is history important and what's so great about memorization?

See these articles by Scott Powell:

Why History: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/004/why_history.html

The Importance of Memorizing History: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/008/powell.html

1. Hopefully you know what subject area interests you. You must not already be memorizing here, or are you?

2. Now pick subject areas that you find totally uninteresting. First off, how sure are you that ten years down the road you would still find these uninteresting and not regret the choices you are making today? That is exactly what happened for me. More on this below.

3. It is not generally the subject area that is uninteresting. What is uninteresting is the way it is taught, or the book you may be using. I used to find History, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Economics, etc. totally uninteresting till 8th grade. Somebody then taught me a different way of learning, which exactly was not learning by rote. All of a sudden, I was finding majority of it interesting, though still not all. So if needed, find a different book that you can "connect better" to. I generally end up reading preface and first chapters of ten books before I select one that I'll read all the way to the end.

4. Reading books of your choice, following a method of educating yourself of your choice, means twice the work -- since you would still have to be memorizing some stuff just for the exams. Someone told me that real-life education process involves balancing between these two. During my undergrad, my goal then was to get just above average grades, since if I were getting better grades, I could trade off some memorization effort to real understanding effort. That's exactly what I did. By junior year, everybody around knew that while I may not be the best student in terms of grades, I was nevertheless the best student. Even the student with best grades was in agreement as she used to state entirely on her own will. I was often titled the most original thinker amongst the total group of 40+ students. And this was because I spent time and effort avoiding plain memorization.

5. You may find this one hard to swallow. Programming is not education (and your priority at this point should be educating yourself), though computer science is. Programming is just a tool to do things. If nothing else, make yourself a master of mathematics, and treat computer science to be a small branch of it. (Computer science as such is very deeply connected to mathematics to be called a small branch of it, but that's not applicable to you at this stage.) There are pieces of learning coming your way that won't change for coming 100 years, and there are some that would change within two years. You know how to prioritize between them. They used to focus a lot on current events. To me, majority of the "current" issues were much less important than ancient history (since those issues won't remain current in a few months time-frame).

6. Always be ready to step outside of your comfort zone. That practice would help you all your life. (For now, maybe those uninteresting subjects are more interesting than what you thought!)

Grammar is never going to thrill most of us. But you should for your own sake learn some foreign languages, and in many of those it is damned handy to know an accusative from a dative or an infinitive from a participle. Again, learn with the use.

To give you an idea, Im finishing up an electrical engineering degree alongside a IT security degree, all with a math minor. So, I'm no slouch when it comes to the 'hard sciences', or I don't think I am. Now, where to begin.

English: Of all, engineers need to communicate with non-technical people, as we're the technical people. They _have_ to trust us when we say 'this works', 'this cant work', or 'I don't know'. Now, how do we communicate this? We do this by writing and speaking. Of course, you can 'write'. Now, is that writing clear enough so that a technical topic can be understood by your non-technical manager, or a VC you are applying to? English teaches you how to communicate what's in your head so others can understand it. The other half is speech, which I view just as important. In my free time, I am looking at volunteering to teach computer literacy courses at the local food pantry/shelter so those of low income can learn how to do things like make resumes and maintain communications. Worksheets, handouts, and books only do so good. This case, effective speech is just as important as the written word. A few misplaced words or bad phrases can either cause confusion or just flat out offend.

Soft sciences: This is the hole where topics like psychology, sociology, political science all fit. I think these studies would be apparent why they could be useful to you. They help understand people and how to relate with them. These sciences can explain the 'why' certain phrases work better than others, and explain how to differ your speech and written patterns when dealing with different cultures. And many of these 'softer sciences' use good ol statistics to make their deductions, so they directly relate back to hard sciences. On the darker side, you can exploit these topics to get people to do your will, because you would understand deeper parts of culture than they would pay attention to. If you were to do this, you would be a tech geek with swaying power: People would come to _you_ for answers. And yes, that has a lot of power attached to it.

History: This is, by far, the hardest for me to relate. It does, by a sort of roundabout way. It's also my one weakest skill, so bear with me here. History meant to me 'stuff' that occurred long ago that would never pertain to me. I mean, how does stuffy dead people do anything to me? Well, lets talk about some unrelated topics.

Lets talk about Markov chains. They're a powerful statistical inference tool. So, who's Markov? Well, he died in 1922, in Russia. Yet, his models and math are used to this day. We'll use his theorems until somebody has better. And his was worked on from earlier theorems and assumptions. If you understand the history, look it as a CVS. If there's an assumption in there, we can work back and understand the root why and 'fix' it or disregard it.

But that is just a tangent of why history is useful. The essence is so we understand how we got to now, by what path, and why. Things that are obvious now weren't so before. History can allow us to understand the whys of math, of psychology, of weaponry, physics, chemistry, of religion, and any other topic. Effectively, the true meaning of history is "not the future and not the present". Even your file system is a historical document that can be inferred upon using statistics and psychology techniques.

Perhaps I cleared up a bit of at least why I value the liberal and softer arts and sciences.