At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.
Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?"
This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
Parents aren’t supposed to be engaged when kids are engaging in free play at the playground or under the supervision of a coach. That’s the definition of a helicopter parent.
If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something.
I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours.
Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
I find restaurants more eye-opening. Amount of toddlers being fed while their mind is zombified with a screen are astonishing. Parents don't want to put effort in engaging the child and screen is an easy legal drug.
Gen x’er. My parents didn’t help me with homework. I was expected to be independent. There was a culture shift in 2000s and we are involved daily with our kids and their homework. This is all anecdotal and I can’t find any studies on the subject.
The most low-tech we are is nothing connects to a WiFi unless it has too and nothing gets upgraded. We replace things when the stop working and can't be repaired.
Yeah but you get the two days of hacking in 15 minutes.
And I highly doubt you spend months, as in 5+ weeks at the least making it production ready.
What even is "production readiness?" 100% fully unit tested and ready for planetary hyper scale or something? 95% of the human generated software I work on is awful but somehow makes people money.
First of all, you can rarely write down in English, what you want in 15 minutes… It’s even common to have longer specification, than its implementation. Just look at tests. Especially, if you want to do something which was never done before, the disparity can be staggering.
Claude Code for example is also not that quick at all. It produces some code quickly, but even scaffolding three hello world level example projects together definitely takes more than an hour. And that’s with zero novelty. The first version of code is done quickly, but the continuous loop of self corrections after that takes a long time. Even with Serena, Context7, and other MCPs.
And, of course, without real code review. That’s easily hours even with just few thousands lines of code, if it uses something which you don’t know. But I know that almost everybody gave up understanding “their” “own” code, during vibe coding. Even before AIs, it was a well known fact, that real code reviewing is hard, and people rarely did it.
AI can make you quicker in certain situations, but these “15 minutes” claims are totally baseless. This is one reason why many people are against AIs, vibe coding, etc. These stupid claims which cannot hold even the smallest scrutiny.
I still find value in the code editor. I often switch between manually editing code and letting Claude Code run free on smaller tasks, but I haven't gotten close to the point where it can write 100% of the code.
I've been middle management for half my career and the role has never been about explaining or requirements or defining context like I do with an LLM to code...
What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
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