<p>Are you a critic of memorizing performance?</p>
<p>What worked for you?</p>
<p>Do you think students that memorize are learning in the wrong way?</p>
<p>Can you understand material and memorize at the same time? So why to criticize memorization?</p>
<p>Share your experiences… Do you memorize material and forgot after couple of weeks?
Did you memorize and learn the material forever? Or did you forget after couple of weeks?</p>
<p>What techniques do you use for long term learning?</p>
<p>Do you try to understand a material without memorizing?</p>
<p>Memorization is one part of learning. For example, you can’t get very far when studying a foreign language without memorizing vocabulary. You can’t get past the third grade without memorizing addition and multiplication facts.</p>
<p>Students who memorize aren’t wrong. But students who rely only on memorization will find that they have limitations in their learning. It’s best to combine memorization with other ways of engaging with the course material.</p>
<p>I think that learning how to memorize long pieces of text is a crucial study skill.
When I was in 4th grade, my teacher handed out a poem for us to memorize each week and recite in front of the class. This was not required, but for some reason, I decided to do this. In the begining, they were short poems, maybe only 4 lines long. As the year progressed, they got quite a bit longer. I memorized almost every poem that year. </p>
<p>When I got to high school I realized being able to memorize large amounts of text was very handy when it came time for test taking. While it is important to be able to discuss an topic, it’s impossible to write an essay on a topic if you haven’t memorized the important points.</p>
<p>Also, advanced math is much, much easier and quicker to solve if you have the basic math facts memorized. </p>
<p>So, I think that memorization helps advanced thinking. It’s hard to have one without the other.</p>
<p>I’m always intrigued by jeopardy contestants. How do they accrue so much knowledge in so different subjects? Learning by memorizing or by understanding of concepts or perhaps both?</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with memorizing. Some things also need to be understood. I can still recite Tennyson’s “Ullyses” - it takes about five minutes to get through the whole thing.</p>
<p>The kids I work with are at such a disadvantage if they haven’t memorized the times tables. They lack confidence in math and are much slower. Memorization has its role.</p>
<p>Greenery
Yes, I still do remember a few of those poems. I learned them about 35 years ago!!</p>
<p>I developed an interest in poetry later on that I attribute in part to memorizing all those poems. My Mom gets the rest of the credit as she read Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poems to me when I was little.</p>
<p>Long term effect - well I do make my own kids memorize regularly. (Yes, I’m a mean homeschooling mommy. ) I can see where all the memory work that I’ve done with them has helped them academically quite a bit. It’s also essential for anyone who does public speaking. I’ve had my kids work on public speaking skills over the years. When they got to college, they were very glad that they were comfortable speaking in front of others. (It was good for their grades too.)</p>
<p>Good for you bookreader! As well, I believe in inspiring our little ones and teach them how to love and enjoy reading good books. It has helped them…</p>
<p>My husband and oldest S have elephant memories for facts. They read things and not only remember what they read but remember what book, what page, what author… My H is an engineer, and has an incredible number of details stored away. Of course, he can’t ever remember what I send him to the store for…</p>
<p>My S uses his amazing memory to win lots of t-shirts at Trivia nights.</p>
<p>My second son and daughter are both musicians, who memorize tons of music. My son’s teacher once told him that he hasn’t really learned a piece if he can’t play it by memory. My daughter’s teacher once called her the “memorizing monster” since she tends to memorize as she goes. I think that is why she is so good at languages, as well.</p>
<p>Me. I can’t memorize. I’ve always been terrible at it, and it was my downfall in sciences. I had to do the last minute memorizing for exams, and promptly forgot it afterwards. When it is important for me to remember something, I use lots of things like mnemonics and other mental tricks. Or sticky notes. However, I am very good with names and faces, and the rest of my family isn’t.</p>
<p>binx. What do you think it was the most important game or activities they did since childbirth that help them to have or develop so amazing gift?</p>
<p>This is something I think about often because it is such a problem for me. It is entirely possible to learn about something new, understand it thoroughly, and not remember it a day later. I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that analyzing and understanding are not the same thing as retaining for me. I have to consciously memorize it. I didn’t have to do this when I was younger. I’m learning a new language now and retaining new vocabulary is killing me. If they were all set to a song, I’d remember it no problem. I can remember any song lyric, but I can’t remember a book I finished reading last week.</p>
<p>Its a necessary part of some learning and serves a purpose. And it can be handy for grades in many classes. But when all one is doing is memorizing, or all that is being taught is something to memorize its a problem. When one is not actually developing a conceptual, abstract, real understand of something, or is unable to connect separate concepts to make new ones, or apply concepts learned to new problems, that is when a problem arises. Some of the highest scoring students I’ve met are extremely good memorizers, but not very bright in the true sense of the word. </p>
<p>Actually all students I meet are amazing memorizers…they can regurgitate anything for a test and I suspect it was a necessary ability to succeed with the right grades in HS to get into this selective college program they are in. While this facility is a good start to learning, and a way to get through some classes with high grades, its only a start to real learning. And while they can all memorize and repeat the course word for word, only a subset demonstrate real understanding. It’s intriguing and sad, frustrating and worrisome. And I work constantly on improving that situation with my students. </p>
<p>To illustrate, if I were to ask them a question that allowed them to list the five laws and their definition, 100% of them would get it correct. A good portion would write word for word from something they read. And I couldn’t care less they can do that-- it isn’t going to be useful nor do I give them much for doing so. BUT, if I ask them to read a brand new thing and apply the relevant laws to explain what’s going on, maybe half can do it. And THAT is something they need to take away if my course is of any value. If I ask them to compare and contrast these laws, they’d start listing the memorized features of each, but many would be unable to actually contrast and compare and be unable to perceive or articulate relationships between them at a higher level of abstraction. Such tasks would demonstrate a deeper and necessary understanding (for my kind of courses) and it’s quite apart from memorizing.</p>
<p>Greenery, my oldest truly scores off the charts in actual tests of her visual memory (at least the 99th percentile but she hits the ceiling so we don’t really know her ability). She can commit to memory very fast and retrieve an entire page, in detail, placing things where they belong and the memory decay is very slow. It makes a fantastic crutch for many courses. </p>
<p>We have some theories for its source. One is just genetic. both parents are strong visual-spatial types. And I have a great visual memory: I can read my class notes in a few minutes and remember them for a whole class, in detail and order (oddly, this kind of memory for me is soooo easy but yet i can’t remember a book I just read or a movie I just watched, and my memory for trivia is terrible!). </p>
<p>But another may be happenstance She’s sooo strongly a visual-spatial learner and some evidence suggests auditory deficits in critical early periods may have pushed her to develop this aspect of her brain. She had serious repeat infections, hearing loss, ear surgeries as a child. It also has come with some deficits too on the auditory-sequencing front, but her visual memory and spatial abilities seem to compensate well so far. I have found a number of academic studies supporting this link, and we know af ew kids with a similar health history with the same abilities. Who knows.</p>
<p>Learning is not an either/or process.
Different kinds of material are best learned by different learning processes. Memorization is certainly one of them.</p>
<p>I’ve observed a problem with kids who rely too much on memorization in classes like government or history–they memorize “blocks” of information, but don’t really understand how the facts relate to one another.</p>
<p>I agree, of course, that memorization is necessary for foreign languages, math, and the sciences. With respect to English, I think there is a place for more memorization of texts than most students do these days, but again I think understanding and the ability to analyze are more important.</p>
<p>No clue. I think a lot of it is genetic - from my H’s side. There were activities I did that highlighted my kids’ good memories, but I’m not sure they actually caused it.</p>
<p>Here is an example. My oldest S began learning to talk with animal sounds – eg. “What does a cow say?” At that time, we had a set of alphabet refrigerator magnets. He would carry them to me one at a time, and ask what they were. “That’s an M.” “What does M say?” “mmmmmmm.” By the time he was 15 months old he could identify every letter, and tell “what it said.” He learned to put them in alphabetical order around age 2. About that same time, he began spelling simple words, and sounding out others. At 27 months, he accompanied me to my OB appointment (pregnant with S2). In the waiting room, he spotted a sign over the door. He asked (he had a piercing voice), “What does e-x-i-t spell, Mommy?” “sound it out.” <pause> “Mommy, what does exit mean?”</pause></p>
<p>A room full of prenant ladies gasped.</p>
<p>Honestly, he was my first child, and I wasn’t really aware that what he was doing was that unusual. I was asked often if I “did flashcards with him”. I was offended at the time by the implication that I was trying to force my kid to do something. I guess in a sense, it was like flashcards - in that it was a game for him to identify the letters. Except that it was his initiative, not mine.</p>
<p>I think it’s a chicken/egg thing. If he did not naturally have a good memory, I’ve no doubt he would have tired of this game, or not even have played it. But the mental exercise he got from playing it propelled him along. I could never interest my second or third children in this game. My second child didn’t even talk till he was two. (And following S1, I was convinced S2 was handicapped.)</p>
<p>Ahem, speaking as the resident Jeopardy champion (I was a 5-time champ back in the 90s), I can tell you what worked for me. To begin with, Jeopardy knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. You need to know something about a lot of things but not very much about anything. Plus you need to have a mental knack for being able to sort, store, and quickly recall and link a wide range of discrete facts. And if I had to sum up learning Jeopardy knowledge in a single phrase, I’d say that success on Jeopardy comes from a lifetime of paying attention. </p>
<p>And once you have acquired a huge base of information from reading, traveling, watching TV, etc., Jeopardy players usually augment that with memorization to cram certain facts for the actual games. You need to memorize certain lists: US presidents, the birth places of the US presidents, state capitals, state nicknames, world capitals, famous operas and their composers, etc. All this knowledge needs to be instantly at your fingertips. But notice that all these lists are finite lists. Memorization is no good for trying to master huge bodies of knowledge or abstract concepts.</p>
<p>For school learning as opposed to Jeopardy learning, I found memorization to again be a very useful adjunct to mastering concepts. I went all the way through high school and college as a B student - studying concepts and going to into exams prepared to “figure out” the answer to the questions or problems. But by time I got to grad school, I had met my wife who was an A student. And she taught me a few simple memorization techniques (mostly flashcards) that turned me from a B student into a straight A student like her. This was especially useful for exams with limited time - where you won’t have enough time to figure things out.</p>
<p>jeopardy I could handle because it is amazing how much info you accumulate just from living, but short term memory is what I have a problem with.
I have poor face recognition even when I have spent time with the person, especially out of context.
I recently lost my late mothers ring that I had been wearing for about a week after her death. I wasn’t familiar with it & when I checked the lost and found at my school when they notified me that they had a ring of that description, it did not look familiar to me at all.</p>
<p>( I still picked it up though because how many " old lady " rings of that description were going to be lost on a college campus?)</p>
) I can see where all the memory work that I’ve done with them has helped them academically quite a bit. It’s also essential for anyone who does public speaking. I’ve had my kids work on public speaking skills over the years. When they got to college, they were very glad that they were comfortable speaking in front of others. (It was good for their grades too.)</p>