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.
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.
If you haven’t already, you should watch Mystery Team specifically for the character of Duncan “Boy Genius” who absolutely fits this characterization to a T.
I always hated that they made us relearn the parts of speech every year in middle school and high school English. Surely by now it’s sunk in, I thought.
But then the CHUDs started losing their minds about pronouns.
On the flip side, most American engineering degree programs do not rely on rote memorization, and instead heavily emphasize problem solving (especially these days), because, you know, computers and the internet exist, and faculty tend to understand that fact.
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.
It’s American Exceptionalism at work. Unlike the rest of the world, we have no healthcare, we use Fahrenheit, and we put on our pants one leg at a time.
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.
Also had to memorise it, and though its been ages, i can get the properties of some elements just by remembering +/- where on the table it is. So idk, sounds like a educational purpose :')
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
I recall having a teacher who said that as long as a student was legitimately trying regardless of anything the teacher would always give them more extra credit so they could reach whatever grade they wanted to aim for. You could tell he legitimately loves teaching kids and would light up whenever a kid who had been struggling finally understood something.
I had a teacher that the first day told us “my ratio of approved students is 99% and I’m not gonna lower it because of you”. A great teacher.
The next year the one that gave us the same thing told us “how many of you didn’t pass last year?”. Nobody answered because everyone passed. “This year won’t be the same” was his reply. A SHITTY teacher. The worst one I’ve had in all my live.
And we have a book that you can use at every chemistry, biology, math and physics exam with a lot a formulas, glyph explenations, periodic table, material properties etc…
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.
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
I had to memorize it in university. And I didn’t even study chemistry, but “engineering science”. As a matter of fact: I actually always disliked chemistry.
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
It’s a thing with some teachers in some places. The quality of education in the US is hugely variable, because standards and curriculum are largely left up to local school systems with widely different funding and priorities.
In my US chemistry undergrad program, we were required to memorize ~40 elements that were frequently used. We had reference material available to us in the test packets, but the test time given was so low that if you hadn’t memorized those elements, you didn’t have time to finish the test.
Our general chemistry class was one of the hardest classes you could take and much of the grading seemed unfair. Very minor mistakes that could propagate throughout your calculations would lose full points. There was never enough time for exams: you were expected to be very sure of how to run your calculations, there wasn’t extra time for you to be unsure or have to redo an entire question because you messed up. It truly sucked.
That said, it was very effective at graduating competent chemists. I didn’t trust any of the biologists, nurses, pharmacists, etc. to do even basic unit conversions unless they took that class. You can often tell well into someone’s professional career if they went through such a rigorous training program because many of the calculations and principles we learned in this class are ones we use daily. I run into PhDs in biology fields who don’t know the difference between molar and molarity, ones who are inconsistent at converting masses to mols, etc.
It’s embarrassing to reach that point in your career and lack these basic skills. I’ll hear, “yeah, but they aren’t chemists, so it’s not so important that they know these things.” If that’s so, then why do they need to do it as part of their job? Skills like these are agnostic to degrees and positions, it’s like learning basic arithmetic for most scientists.
I fucking hated that class and the professor for putting us through that, but that faded quickly with time. He made the rest of our education easier and prepared us well for the work that was ahead.
In the UK we had to memorise up to 20 (Calcium), but that was alongside knowing how the elements are grouped and orbits of electrons etc. for GCSE chemistry (age 14-16, end of secondary school)
Brazil here, we had to, me and my friends even made some vulgar funny songs (to teenagers at least) to help memorize it, I had a pretty bad chem teacher.
When I was doing my Chemistry class in like 6th grade (Eastern European btw), we had to memorize it as one of our first assignments lol. Ofc, we didn’t need to know the full table but progressively learn the first 30-50 elements over the span of few months.
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.
If you haven’t already, you should watch Mystery Team specifically for the character of Duncan “Boy Genius” who absolutely fits this characterization to a T.
Prepositions, anyone?
Aboard about above…
I always hated that they made us relearn the parts of speech every year in middle school and high school English. Surely by now it’s sunk in, I thought.
But then the CHUDs started losing their minds about pronouns.
On the flip side, most American engineering degree programs do not rely on rote memorization, and instead heavily emphasize problem solving (especially these days), because, you know, computers and the internet exist, and faculty tend to understand that fact.
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.
It’s American Exceptionalism at work. Unlike the rest of the world, we have no healthcare, we use Fahrenheit, and we put on our pants one leg at a time.
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.
Also had to memorise it, and though its been ages, i can get the properties of some elements just by remembering +/- where on the table it is. So idk, sounds like a educational purpose :')
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
Yea definitely shout out to those teachers.
I recall having a teacher who said that as long as a student was legitimately trying regardless of anything the teacher would always give them more extra credit so they could reach whatever grade they wanted to aim for. You could tell he legitimately loves teaching kids and would light up whenever a kid who had been struggling finally understood something.
I had a teacher that the first day told us “my ratio of approved students is 99% and I’m not gonna lower it because of you”. A great teacher.
The next year the one that gave us the same thing told us “how many of you didn’t pass last year?”. Nobody answered because everyone passed. “This year won’t be the same” was his reply. A SHITTY teacher. The worst one I’ve had in all my live.
Czech here, also had to memorize it. But our school system here is 90% just memorizing shit, it’s a fucking joke.
In Lithuania we literally have the whole periodic table on the wall in every chemistry class I have ever been to.
In the US we also have that in a lot of classes… they just cover it up during tests -_-
Same in Hungary
And we have a book that you can use at every chemistry, biology, math and physics exam with a lot a formulas, glyph explenations, periodic table, material properties etc…
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.
Gut gemacht, Leiser
Memorizing the periodic table is probably the high-school assignment I’m most angry about to this day.
You didn’t have to memorize the Canterbury Tales?
I’d find that less-useless. You can’t reference the Summoner’s tale in 1 second.
I had to look up what the summoner’s tale was. I can say this from memory.
"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke."
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
You were lucky. Many education systems around the world still use memorization instead of comprehension as a measurement of learning.
It might be, I didn’t take chemistry in high school but those I know who did spent weeks memorizing it.
American here - we didn’t have to memorize it. All we had to do was know the groupings (Noble gas, metalloids, etc)
Are you talking about Binas? All the homies love Binas.
We were expected to memorize it, yes, along with the properties of each column and generally what went where.
But that was like the first part of chem, and after that test we had the table up on the front wall.
I had to memorize it in university. And I didn’t even study chemistry, but “engineering science”. As a matter of fact: I actually always disliked chemistry.
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
It’s a thing with some teachers in some places. The quality of education in the US is hugely variable, because standards and curriculum are largely left up to local school systems with widely different funding and priorities.
In my US chemistry undergrad program, we were required to memorize ~40 elements that were frequently used. We had reference material available to us in the test packets, but the test time given was so low that if you hadn’t memorized those elements, you didn’t have time to finish the test.
Our general chemistry class was one of the hardest classes you could take and much of the grading seemed unfair. Very minor mistakes that could propagate throughout your calculations would lose full points. There was never enough time for exams: you were expected to be very sure of how to run your calculations, there wasn’t extra time for you to be unsure or have to redo an entire question because you messed up. It truly sucked.
That said, it was very effective at graduating competent chemists. I didn’t trust any of the biologists, nurses, pharmacists, etc. to do even basic unit conversions unless they took that class. You can often tell well into someone’s professional career if they went through such a rigorous training program because many of the calculations and principles we learned in this class are ones we use daily. I run into PhDs in biology fields who don’t know the difference between molar and molarity, ones who are inconsistent at converting masses to mols, etc.
It’s embarrassing to reach that point in your career and lack these basic skills. I’ll hear, “yeah, but they aren’t chemists, so it’s not so important that they know these things.” If that’s so, then why do they need to do it as part of their job? Skills like these are agnostic to degrees and positions, it’s like learning basic arithmetic for most scientists.
I fucking hated that class and the professor for putting us through that, but that faded quickly with time. He made the rest of our education easier and prepared us well for the work that was ahead.
I agree with you. Though some people out there do really love being flesh books.
We had to memorize a small part of it in Turkiye too, but there is a new curriculum coming up which has a chance of changing that.
Binas in the Netherlands
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If teacher is shitty, he will force students to memorise it, as mine.
In the UK we had to memorise up to 20 (Calcium), but that was alongside knowing how the elements are grouped and orbits of electrons etc. for GCSE chemistry (age 14-16, end of secondary school)
Brazil here, we had to, me and my friends even made some vulgar funny songs (to teenagers at least) to help memorize it, I had a pretty bad chem teacher.
When I was doing my Chemistry class in like 6th grade (Eastern European btw), we had to memorize it as one of our first assignments lol. Ofc, we didn’t need to know the full table but progressively learn the first 30-50 elements over the span of few months.