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<p>Don’t you believe what I’m writing?</p>
<p>i believe what i’m writing.</p>
<p>i don’t think that you believe what you are writing.</p>
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<p>So you think maybe there’s more to college than a GPA? And that, while a high GPA might be achieved by memorizers, there are other ways to learn and understand material in a test-compatible way? </p>
<p>And that, ultimately, grade deflation could distinguish between the conceptual learners who are slightly more flexible with their knowledge and the memorizers who have slightly more rigid thinking? </p>
<p>Could there be more than one way to learn? Maybe not all 4.0 students memorize, and not all 4.0 students conceptually understand? </p>
<p>I doubt it.</p>
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<p>how is being able to establish something through reason inferior to just memorizing it?</p>
<p>memorizing everything is clearly the inferior strategy–if you can’t even reason about the things that are told to you, how in hell are you going to come up with new things or apply theory to a new problem?</p>
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<p>How are you going to analyze the actions of the Roman Emperors if you don’t know their names?</p>
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<p>Ultimately college is about preparing you for the next stage. Entry into grad school
or the working world. Do you have the skills, theory, temperament, experience and
poise to make it in the working world?</p>
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<p>how are you going to be able to use the c library functions effectively if you don’t have all of the function signatures memorized?</p>
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<p>What is reasoning? I argue that reasoning is Memorizing pieces of information that can be stacked to give a less than coherent whole, but a full enough data set that you can solve simple problems.</p>
<p>Reasoning is like building a Jenga tower and pulling out the blocks. Except the Conceptual Learner already pulled out the blocks while receiving input, and is now trying to recreate the tower using a partial set of blocks. </p>
<p>The Memorizer, in his superiority, instead retains the WHOLE BUILDING. There is no need to understand the interaction of all the little atoms if you know how to build a skyscraper.</p>
<p>Professors aren’t required to do any kind of curve. If half the class isn’t good at the subject then they just aren’t good at it. It sucks, but it’s true. The person got an A because they studied their ass off or they’re just naturally good at the subject. There will be other subjects that you’re naturally good at yourself.</p>
<p>Edit:</p>
<p>Oh wow, I should have known that this thread would have exploded into insanity by the time I posted!</p>
<p>And for the record, the good history classes are all about understanding history: understanding what effects events had and how that relates to today. Good history professors will make you really dig deep into the subject. If all you’re doing in your history class is memorizing president names and war dates, get yourself a new history teacher! Sure you need to know that information, but learn it while you’re also learning what the subject is actually about.</p>
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<p>At work, I will just grab a reference book or ask the local language guru.</p>
<p>That’s a bit harder on an exam.</p>
<p>What you do in the real world is different from what you do to try to get good grades.</p>
<p>justtotalk, i’ll continue your analogy.</p>
<p>what happens if the memorizer is expected to build a little house next door? he’s screwed. he doesn’t know how to build anything.</p>
<p>the conceptual learner knows how to construct buildings. he’d be fine.</p>
<p>I feel that there is a disconnect between what different people define as memorizing.</p>
<p>To me a bad memorizer is someone who learns something only because it’s going to be on the test and they need to get a good grade and then doesn’t understand what they are memorizing and forgets everything (doesn’t even retain one ounce of information or concept)</p>
<p>However, I think that someone who memorizes but also understands what they are memorizing and can apply what they are “memorizing” is doing a good job. They also are memorizing in a way that they want to learn the material.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but no sane exam for an intro programming class would ask you to spit out the prototypes for all of the library calls. just like no sane history exam would ask you to list all of the roman emperors. of course, you need to memorize a few things, but it certainly isn’t purely memorization.</p>
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<p>This is, of course, nonsense. The Conceptual Learner can not construct a building with an understanding of how atoms bond, and how these interactions can fuse together into a building, if he does not Memorize the compressive strength of concrete.</p>
<p>The Conceptual Learner’s “reasoning” is only useful because of the Memorizer’s “knowledge.” You can not do anything with an incomplete data set. You need both the atomic picture and the macro picture. </p>
<p>Who stores this information that the Conceptual Learner needs? How does this information get transferred? The transcriber of information allows all Conceptual growth to occur; Memorizers ultimately become these Transcribers. Nowadays, computers are their workstations. In the future, the Conceptual will create us a new workstation–only because the Memorizers retained the necessary information for the Conceptual to succeed.</p>
<p>As you can see, Memorizers are awfully similar to computers. This is why I argue that computers will soon have artificial intelligence.</p>
<p>People assume this means that the computers will be high functioning. I argue that this means humans are low functioning.</p>
<p>This is getting somewhat off-topc lol. In the real world, conceptual thinkers never work unless they are really good at it.</p>
<p>well yeah, you do need to memorize a few things. </p>
<p>the person who memorizes everything though is going about learning in a terrible way. if he can’t reason, he’s not going to be able to do much . . .</p>
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<p>Finite state machines without programming?</p>
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<p>I worked on AI back in the 80s when there was so much promise. It’s decades later and things are a little better but very few people understand what AI is and what it can potentially do.</p>
<p>Have you ever written an expert system? Such an exercise can demonstrate that understanding models of human thought is a very hard problem.</p>
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<p>What is “doing much?” If you surpass your parents’ intelligence and contribute more inventions/new data to the world, yet your parents allowed you this growth and supported your entire growing process, then did you do more than your parents?</p>
<p>A man is only as good as his crutch.</p>
<p>there’s no way in hell you are going to be able to invent something new if you don’t even understand how the old stuff works. people who do purely rote memorization don’t understand how the old stuff works.</p>
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<p>I haven’t. But it should surprise no one that these expert systems are now doing the heavy lifting in many technical and high-expertise areas. They are the new generation of Memorizers.</p>
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<p>You misunderstood. Memorizers are the Conceptual Learner’s crutch. </p>
<p>//end ■■■■■ here</p>
<p>I really do believe it’s arrogant to think of memorization as a lower-level type of learning that is beneath you. Retaining reams of information is a skill. “Spewing” that information back out in an orderly and efficient fashion is a greater skill. We should be trying to understand how people memorize effectively instead of bashing them for doing so. It would help us sift through and understand the way-too-large-load of information we capture these days.</p>
<p>Fortunately, my thought is hardly original. There are many people trying to do this today.</p>