Education is cultivating relationships [mother and child, teacher and pupil, coach and team]

And finally, the most useful thing to know is probably language, I mean the subtleties of a language and its literature because it leads you to all the questions that will make you learn more.

This was my twopence for Christmas!

But baby / bath water.

At school, I ignored hand writing skills and spelling and just focused on the meaning of words. And in an age of word processing, I got lucky.

But you only need to see the number or adults that can’t construct a percentage to realise that short cuts don’t always pay off.

I wouldn’t have taken kindly to memorising sin cos tan tables or log tables.

If you take the periodic table example, my incentive to learn it by rote was simple: i then didn’t have to learn a whole bunch of equations.

Learning by rote is a good thing to learn, but children learn better when the incentives are right. Too often learning by rote was forced on kids, “because I tell you to”.

And the output of learning by rote should be understanding, even if it takes time. Not vomiting to paper.

Agree?

I think I learned to read like this, whch is why my spelling is so bad!

The rote learning method – if you call it that – is a good way of absorbing information that may not be easy to “understand”. Like grammer, handwriting etc. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And I can’t help thinking that those who are quick to understand are not really the urgent targets of early education.

IMHO, rote learning may not be all that “rote” afterall.

I was never good at rote learning, frankly, and when I tried, I failed miserably. But what I could remember with one hour of “understanding” took some of my classmates 3 to 4 hours of rote learning.

This lead my mom to keep reminding me during my school days, that I should spend one hour of concentrated understanding rather than 4 hours of rote learning.

My way of reading, which I still pursue today, was more akin to forming connections, almost like a story-line with whatever else existed in my brain and this process was fail-safe for me. Even today, I do end up connecting every bit of information I read up to my central understanding of the world.

Even, for multiplication tables, I remember as a kid, trying to conjure up some imaginary story of numbers, a method I later came to understand does form the basics of “mnemonics”.

I do wish as a kid, I had a “guide” to open up the secrets of learning without rote learning, which I happened to practise out of instinct, but over a long time and some painful agonizing that I can’t learn by rote. I do wish that my teachers didn’t stress too much on rote learning, without exploring other mechanisms that come from understanding.

I am sure each kid, when learning by “rote” uses one or the other mechanism which involves atleast partial understanding, though they might not be aware of the same.

If you don’t force in some rote learning early on, it becomes far harder to get it in later – even if the resistance is lower.

I mean multiplication tables, basic grammer, etc. As I suspect no one here would disagree I guess the argument becomes where the boundary sits.

And of course a good teacher (the only really important bit in education) can make anything intertesting.