Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice
by bithive123 on Sunday December 02, 2012 @05:03PM
(#4862712)
I don't understand your tone. I never said memorization is "bad" or that I "love" critical thinking skills.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
Re:Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice
by kiba on Sunday December 02, 2012 @06:08PM
(#4862975)
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids".
Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.
The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.
I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.
Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.
Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.