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Comment by Lutzb | Hacker News Reader

This is why history resonated so well with me back in school. Instead of just blindly learning historical facts our teachers requested us to explain what were the grounds and cause of historical events.

I still use this when learning new concepts. I try to Llearn what existed before and why the change made sense.

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While the motivation is correct, I would have to take this with a huge boulder of salt due to the inability to accurately obtain and analyze all the information around the historic event.

The epigraph on my textbook for AP Euro is a phrase I still remember 15+ years later: "Good history is a well-told story."

So instead of memorizing facts you were asked to memorize someone's theories, is that really better? To me that was always much worse.

Knowing some of the potential whys and using them to try to explain the following event is a lot more than just memorizing someone else's theory, it's learning to piece together an understanding from information. Even if you don't ultimately agree with "someone else's theory" (say, the common take) you should be able to understand why others think it then add in your arguments of what you think. Any of this is better than wrote memorization.

> Any of this is better than wrote memorization.

This is rote memorization.

> you should be able to understand why others think it then add in your arguments of what you think

This isn't what you have to do on the tests however, the tests just wants you to repeat the theory from the book, or the theory from your teacher. Many seem to just adopt others theories as their own in such scenarios so people who do that might like it, but anyone who thinks for themselves will hate that since you quickly realize this is just another "memorize this thing" situation but you have to write it as if you buy into the theory.

Rote memorization isn't "any time you remember a fact" it's when you solely use repeated memorization to learn something. Discussing the why's and forming an explanation with the content and other things at the time is active/meaningful/associative learning (those are 3 different types of learning from rote memorization, not an ad hoc description).

I'd agree this isn't what you do on a normal test. It didn't sound like GP was arguing these points in a normal test, nor does a normal test match 95% of my APUSH experience either even though that ended in a standardized test.

Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization. Hopefully you can at least imagine other scenarios are possible too.

You do realize the books already talks a lot about why? All subjects already include so many whys that students just filters it out, people just fondly remember the few subjects where they didn't filter out all the interesting parts.

The result is that students just memorize the whys, sure you can always go beyond that and have fun in every class but that has very little to do with the teacher bringing it up, because the teachers brings that up in almost every class or at least the books does. So, that they focused on why is still rote memorization just like the focus on facts, sure facts do tell an interesting tale but if people ignore that and just memorize the facts then they aren't any fun. It is the same way with looking at "why", it is just a bunch of facts in the end and most students makes that boring.

> Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization

No, that is the normal case, almost everyone here did this which is why they have so horrible memories from school. You too probably did this, memorized stuff when the teacher desperately tried to get you to engage with it in more interesting ways, otherwise you wouldn't have thought it is so rare for such teaching to fail, because if you really saw all the teachers that tried you couldn't have had that opinion since you'd see all your classmates zone out and be bored and ask for rote memorization details.

I've never ever seen a schoolbook that was just a list of facts, it just isn't a thing, students still doesn't engage.

Books often give some of the "why" but that's different from a method which engages with the why. The main change is in going from passively interacting with the material "In the book it says... in my notes it says... in class it was said... on the test it wanted me to recall..." to actively interacting with the material "the book had these why's... the teacher/we discussed these why's... i need to be able to defend the argument of why... I also think... on the test I argued why the fact occurred". Even personally bored while doing it or not it's a better way to learn the material.

You do memorize why's but part of arguing the why's, either to the teacher or in groups, is to add interaction with the details. It may or may not be a barrel of fun but it is, by definition, more engaging. Whether or not that's a personal case is going to be subjective but yes, most people really do like learning via more than rote memorization alone all the time in lieu of mixing it up and engaging on average.

I've definitely had classes where the teacher wasn't able to make the content interesting/engaging - it sucked either way in that case. I'm not as sure the teaching "fails" as much as is "not as good". That students zone out is no measure of a method being universally bad, that the method is single approached and almost all students zone out is a good indicator though and that's what you get with constant memorization only.

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