How To Study: 4th Grade & Social Studies

Considering how little the average parent in America helps their grade school age children with their classes, I'd say that making your 10 year old study like this every night is far from the worst thing you could do to them.

I hate to break it to you, but by 4th grade, the homework burden is around an hour each night, minimum. My 1st grader is in for 30 minutes each night. And that does not count the 15-45 minutes of reading they might do.

Lots to learn in 4th grade. You can debate the need, or the value, etc., but the fact is she has to pass the state and fed assessments, and that is how the system is setup. Railing against might eventually change it, but my girls are in it right now, so you have to play the game.

I don't know that memorizing the facts will prove to be important, but I suspect that having been exposed to them at some point will be. In the article she talks about early US settlement. Her daughter probably won't spend a lot of time as an adult working with those facts, but having context about where her society comes from will likely make her more capable in reading news and forming political opinions.

Suppose that the point of her daughter seeing this in school isn't so that she'll know about shipping in Baltimore, but rather so that she'll have a gestalt sense of colonial America. Now suppose that teachers are required to test in some way that students were actually exposed to this material. Since we pretend our school system can measure students objectively, we have to pretend that some facts are the important facts and test recollection of those.

Memorization might actually be a sign that 'real world' use of the facts isn't going to happen. If the facts were applicable in some way, you'd be able to test that children had actually been exposed to them by having them apply the material, not just regurgitate it.

I dearly hope that one of you guys is working on the next great startup that has a solution to this. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways you might be able to 'test' that a child was exposed to the material:

- tests where you write down n things you remember about the topic

- spend five minutes talking to a teacher about what your favourite part of the reading was

- prepare a short presentation, web page, essay, video, poster, whatever about your favourite part of the reading

If we can do that and make it take less teacher time, it might have a chance.

Memorizing facts isn't innately valuable -- it's valuable because it makes critical thinking and problem solving easier. If you have a larger working memory (because you've memorized lots of things before), you'll be able to hold a larger system in your head to analyze.

Unfortunately, the educational system usually separates the memorization phase from the problem-solving phase far too much to establish the causal link. Using chemistry as an example, I think the (incorrect) reasoning runs something like this:

- Most good chemists know the periodic table by heart.

- Therefore, step 1 to being a good chemist is to memorize the entire periodic table.

They have the best of intentions -- every field requires you to know some basic concepts before you can start manipulating them. But when I took a math class in college, we didn't start off by memorizing the definitions of groups, rings, and fields. We just started doing proofs. Everyone learned the definitions fairly quickly just as a side effect of looking them up often enough to solve the problems. So the far better approach is just to memorize "as needed," which also makes the memories more likely to stick around in the brain.

A final example, using history: Originally, I detested it as a subject solidly in the "memorization" category. But I finally got a teacher who forced it into the problem-solving category. Her exams were essays, where we had to write a position paper arguing for a specific side of a political debate. This immediately made those random memorized facts useful, because they could be brought in to support a larger conceptual argument. This teacher was somewhat of a local hero for her incredibly high passing rates -- her students actually learned history, while others merely memorized assorted facts.

There's a maxim in computer science that more data almost always beats a better algorithm. There's a huge amount of information in an educated adult's brain - it has to get there somehow. Some of it gets there by learning facts in school.

Now, I'd have a bigger problem with why there isn't more science in rote memorization. We already know enough to make a difference in how people study, but I haven't heard of it being actually used except by startups like smart.fm