Is this an American thing? We did absolutely not have to memorize any of that thing. We had to understand the structure, why the rows and columns etc. But memorizing it serves no purpose.
With every class including tests and exams we were allowed to use a reference book. This book was pretty thick and contained a whole lot of info including the periodic table and all the info about elements you could ever need.
I think my education (keep in mind this was 25 years ago) was focused more on the why and less on the what. If you understand why something is the way it is, the reason behind it and how to use it, you know a lot more than just being a flesh book that can list a bunch of facts.
It’s easier to verify rote memorization than actual understanding so naturally shitty schools focus on the former at the expense of the latter. Most American schools are shitty by academic standards.
You’re not kidding. Public school in the city.
There were so many dumb things I had to memorize. Periodic table. Solar system moon and planets. Multiplication table.
Even worse is the people who see memory as intelligence because of that BS. I remember working at a office and the boss made Steve, the guy who knew 15 digits of Pi, his right hand man. Steve is currently still working there. Congrats Steve your superior memory apparently can’t get you out of your deadend job.
While it is true that rote memorization is a terrible thing for schools to focus on, I find it interesting that the discussion immediately jumped to “America bad” with a presumption it was a unique American practice. The many comments from around the world show it seems to be a more widespread practice.
In Spain we did have to memorize it. Truly idiotic. People just invented mnemonic phrases to get through the exam and that’s it. It served no educational purpose whatsoever.
Of the four levels of learning, rote memorization is the lowest, easiest to achieve, easiest to test, and least useful. The student can demonstrate the ability to repeat a memorized phrase verbatim, or given a couple seconds to think about it they can rephrase it in their own words using their mental thesaurus. Multiple choice and short answer questions test rote memorization, which happen to be easy to grade, machines can do it. Rote memorization will have little effect on the student’s overall behavior, if it’s all you teach and test for you’re not a teacher you’re just cosplaying as one.
My teacher, in germany, used memorising it as a punishment. Like four dudes in my class had to do it.
Our teacher offered extra credit to anyone who chose to memorize it. It was crazy too, I almost considered trying it since it didn’t seem that hard. The extra credit was enough to affect 20 percent of the grade. Then I realized most people who would try it are probably just smart enough to get an A already anyways, I know I was.
In my school extra credit like that was mostly for the smart people who dicked around a lot or had difficult home lives and missed tests. That way if you needed to shore up some grades you could get it done outside the normal study routine
In Lithuania we literally have the whole periodic table on the wall in every chemistry class I have ever been to.
My school was barely 15 years ago, but we also had a thin book handed out to us in 7th grade or so that contained charts and references for pretty much everything in a very condensed form. Periodic tables, formulas for math and physics, chemical and physical attributes for a bunch of materials, … And the entire ASCII table for some reason.
That was in Germany during the 00s and I still have that book, and three or four copies I stole over time.
Memorizing the periodic table is probably the high-school assignment I’m most angry about to this day.
I’d find that less-useless. You can’t reference the Summoner’s tale in 1 second.
In America, we didn’t have to truley memorize it. For tests we had a reference packet that included the table.
That being said we did have to memorize a few major ones.
Its also important to recognize education is a state by state thing, not federal. The curriculum in Texas can be different than the one in Florida. Even teacher to teacher, I could see one class having to memorize it while the one next door doesn’t.
In my highschool we had an English teacher who was super into the Beatles. Like “the second half of the year was literally just learning about the Beatles and it made up like 60% of your grade”. I used to like listening to them but not so much after that year. To this day I don’t know how they got away with that
In Canada even in university I don’t think it was expected to be memorized.
My prof did offer extra credit to anyone who could sing the entire element song in front of the whole class, which was very fun, and some people nailed it.
My highschool teachers did the same.
I’ve always liked those efforts to make bohring content engaging
