Quote:
Originally Posted by aniT
Uhhhh.. I never said or implied any such thing.
I am saying that simply making kids memorize things will not have a lasting effect. You have to teach them how to do it. I was never taught any spelling rules or tricks. We were simply given words, told the write them 5x each and were expected to be able to spell them at the end of the week. Memorizing them only worked until the next list came along.
Same with math. Memorizing the times tables in third and fourth grade does not have a lasting effect on anyone I have ever meet. It is far more important that the kids know why 3X3=9 and how to get there than to simply spit out that 3X3=9.
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What maybe you are not seeing is that learning a concept often happens in a sequence. Full, rich, complex understanding is like the tip of the pyramid, but that has to come LAST. What has to happen first is the foundation of the learning, which is the grunt work of the rote memorization.
Time and again, especially with logical disciplines like math and sentence diagramming, you need as a teacher to prepare that ground for those conceptual flashes, and the ground gets prepared by doing the grunt work.
The best analogy I can make is to Daniel-San doing the "wax on, wax off" maneuver in
The Karate Kid. Initially, Daniel is given the cloth and told a specific way in which the wax on the car (and the paint on the fence, and the sealant on the deck) needs to be put on, but not WHY. Over and over and over he does this, not knowing why. He works his little Ralph Macchio butt off, still not knowing why, until these actions are ingrained in the very fiber of his being.
THEN and only then does Mr. Miyagi throw him a punch -- a punch which Daniel blocks with the "wax off" gesture he's done again and again. Then another -- which he blocks with "paint up" and "paint down."
And then the novice was enlightened.
With mathematics, to make the analogy clear, what worked pretty well for us was for my DD to do the "grunt work," the "wax on, wax off" of memorizing the multiplication tables. It can (and should!) be done in a fun way -- we like songs around here, courtesy of "Schoolhouse Rock" and the Internet -- to remember "One times eight is eight...two times eight is sixteen" and so on. Then we played with manipulatives, showing how one group of eight and another group of eight equaled sixteen, and so on. Then we did written problems with the aid of manipulatives, and finally just the written problems. Building up, you see, from the grunt work to the concrete representation, to the abstract.
Far too often, people undervalue the grunt work because it's "boring." It's not "interesting." It's not "fun." Well, it's the foundation of the building, and the person who puts in all the "fun" elements in a house and neglects the foundation finds they've built a piece of crud that falls down with the first wind. Same thing. It's all well and good to say, "Oh, I teach WHY 3x3=9," with the tone implying that one doesn't dirty one's hands with boring, blue-collar, grunt-work
memorization, but very often in my experience, that leaves kids who aren't able to do the simplest of operations without a calculator. They might know why three times three is nine, but not how to get there without punching buttons.