, 1 min read
If we taught you to memorize, we failed you
Tall, Dark, and Mysterious wrote about this student she has in her class who is actually a fairly typical student:
“I memorized how to do the problem you did in class, but then on the test you put a DIFFERENT problem, and you never showed us how to do THAT one, and it’s not fair! My method of doing math by memorizing formulas and then blindly applying them to problems that are identical to the ones I’ve seen has gotten me A’s until now, so what gives?”
Repeat after me: memorization is not learning. Learning has to be a higher level task.