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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

A lot of US-based STEMmers (at least of my era, so late Gen X/early Millenial) had the experience that the rote learning presented through the public education system was tiresome and pointless, and concluded—with some justification—that _all_ rote learning is tiresome and pointless.

This is a really unfortunate outcome, as getting base facts and figures into your memory is actually hugely beneficial. There’s no other way to rapidly pick up a new spoken language, for example.

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This is another good point, some things you can’t get around memorizing. I also grew up in an environment where I learned to loath rote memorization. But some things are impossible without a bunch of memorization work. I tried DJing for a bit and it’s just a fact the better you have songs memorized and lots of them the better you’ll be at it. The best DJs I’ve met have a memory of at least the structure of thousands of tracks.

I find repeated use and connection to other (perhaps familiar) concepts far more valuable for memory than rote memorization. Flash cards would help me pass a test in school, but I wasn’t going to remember a year later when I needed that prerequisite knowledge for the next class.

I believe the more accurate thing to say is that many of us got so fed up with rote memorization that we devalued all types of memorization. There are good and bad methods of memorization, experiential memorization is definitely better than rote if you can create the circumstances for it. But some of us just wrote off memorization being valuable period.

Then make flash cards that make connections or relation to other concepts.

Oh how I wish we could just use years like '84-'93 in lieu of obscure generational tags.. I agree with your general idea a lot of people were burnt out of rote memorization.

It's okay to memorize things - but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization'

> but I think if you teach the 'why of the equations' instead of just memorization of them - the memory would lock in with 'forced memorization'

I have a simple but great example of that: A decade of schooling and I could never remember the formula for volume of a sphere. And then, one day when I was bored at my part-time job, I pulled out a piece of paper and used what I'd just learned in calculus to derive it. It's stuck with me since, now that all the parts of the equation have meaning.

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