Sunday, September 11, 2016

Hmm …

 Are your kids back in school? Time to apologize to them | Fox News.
As a parent myself, I literally apologized to each of my children—and not just once—for the fact that so much of their time as grade school and junior high school and high school students (even at private school) was being spent on memorization, regurgitation and rote learning that amounted to busy work and the warehousing of them, physically and mentally.
Depends on what you're memorizing. Pretty hard to learn the times tables or Englsh orthography without memorization. And memorizing poems and reciting them is the best way to learn poetry. Actually, learning to use your memory is a good thing. And getting some facts and figures down by rote gives you something to think and talk about. And not everything that is useful to do is fun.

1 comment:

  1. I taught for 32 years. The parent's comments are common but no less infantile for that. Regurgitation used to be called explaining. Explain how the combustion engine works. Explain how a sonnet works. Explain how King Lear works. Lucky is the person who carries a couple of dozen poems in his head through life.

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