Why you need to memorize facts
If you visit Thomas Frank’s YouTube channel, you will find a
number of videos that will help you memorize information. In his telling, the only reason to do that is
to score well on tests.
There are better reasons.
The first is that if you aspire to mastery in anything, from
chess to chemistry, lab tests to languages, baseball stats to business
probabilities, you need to know stuff—a lot of stuff. Research on expertise has demonstrated that
one of the defining characteristics of an expert is that she has mastered her
specific domain knowledge about medical terminology or computer coding or the
physiology of the brain—whatever.
The lack of such mastery means you are always looking things
up, slowing down your ability to solve problems and make decisions, sometimes
to your employer’s detriment, sometimes to your client's, either of which
detracts from your effectiveness.
Nicholas Carr, in The
Glass Cage, describes how airline pilots, by letting computers fly planes
while they watch over them, see their knowledge and skills degrade to the point
that, when an emergency arises that disables auto-pilot, they lack the ability
to process the situation and make the right decisions. Accidents result, lives are lost.
Background knowledge starts playing a major role in learning
from an early age. When parents don’t
talk much to their four-year-old child, he will struggle to learn to read,
because learning to match printed words to the world relies on previous
knowledge of the world and those things words signify.
Jeanne Chall has explained in detail how that
struggle only gets harder as the child moves from learning to read in grades
1-3 to reading to learn, which begins in fourth grade. If he is behind by the time that starts, odds
are he will never catch up, because the target only gets harder as his peer
group gets older.
The moral: without
knowledge, you will have a hard time learning new things, since we incorporate
new information by relating it to what we already know. No knowledge, no learning.
It’s also nice to know what you’re talking about. As you get older, you’ll be talking more and
more to people who are not your immediate peers. Not knowing your facts when you make a claim
will only encourage those older people to dismiss you more readily. You don’t want to be credible to the folks
who hire you, promote you, mentor you?
As distasteful is it may be to you, memorizing information
is an important skill for you to acquire, and there is no time like the present
to begin, practicing the skill by studying appropriately for those exams you
hate to take.
Resources:
The Jeanne Chall book is The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, avl for loan from EBSCO books.
The foundational research on expertise is in Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise
The foundational research on expertise is in Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise
Some links to Thomas Frank videos:
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