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by worldvoyageur
1544 days ago
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Anecdata plus one. My exact experience tutoring high school kids. Some could totally solve the problem, but the inability to remember the basic facts to start with meant getting the wrong answer, despite an impeccable logic trail. The cost in time to derive basic facts that would have been instantly available had they been memorized also harmed the ability, especially on tests, to get to the end within the time available. 'Drill and kill' has its merits and, if done right, gives the kids a sense of accomplishment and progress. If you start with the wrong facts, or missing facts, you don't end in the right place. |
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I can relate to this amazingly well. I'm dyslexic, so I have trouble remembering thing in the correct "sequence" they need to be memorized in. While taking some of my math classes in college, I particularly struggled with finishing statistics exams in the allotted time since a lot of the rules were (for me) difficult to keep straight in my mind. So, I memorized the bare basic "truths" and would basically start each problem from first principles. I knew them well enough to go very quickly, but I still ran out of time in some of the exams.
I wound up with a C in the class, but the professor commented that I probably would have received one of the highest grades in the class if I had taken the time to commit more of the "shortcuts" to memory and actually finished all the exams. Nearly all the points I'd lost on the exams were from incomplete solutions.
That being said, it was still one of my favorite classes ever, and was immensely useful to me as a newly minted manufacturing engineer in a foundry.