Wouldn't You like to Know?

Over the past few years I've been wanting more and more to make something from mosaic tiles. There is some inherent interest in the idea that each tile has its own mass and identity as a subcomponent of the larger item. Id like to someday work on something practical like this table top.

There's also this artist who I met in the Twin Cities who makes these cutesy domestic projects with different pieces for his tiles. He basically uses super glue to get the individual items attached, then he fills the cracks with tile grout. The process is pretty inexpensive and yields an attractive result.

www.mosaicguy.com

More Idea(ls) from the Ivy Tower

Do you remember when you were in high school and you were expected to remember insane amounts of information for constant quiz and test situations? If you were an outspoken student, or if you had a teacher who listened you explained that you should be allowed to have a cheat sheet for those famous five physics equations, or you were told that knowing dozens of verb conjugations was completely fair.

Though I don't advocate the British educational system's fact-less teaching, I do take some issue with some of the idealistic views involved with memorization.

Case #1 : The derive IT! argument This argument is popular in math and science classes. This is the one where your teacher tells you that you should be able to derive the equation or value- sin30 for instance. What my teacher didn't tell me is what killed me. There wasn't really time on the exam to understand every step to derive things. This was especially painful for trigonometry. I should have just tried memorization of those trig functions. However, the act of memorization was generally minimized.

Case#2 : You should know this by now! This is the favorite of foreign language. Here is the lesson plan: Step one Drone your student through the text book explanations of grammar idiosyncrasies. Step two- pair them up to "exercise" something they don't understand yet. Step 3 Quiz them! You should know this by now! Again, minimizing the actual act of memorizing.

Neither of these cases deal with the way in which we actually learn; the way we memorize information. Ill be the first to admit that my short term memory does not cooperate with me. So what should I, and others like myself have done through high school in these classes?

I argue that the answer is to constantly be creating flash cards. My question is- why was this never really emphasized or considered seriously as an in class activity or seriously suggested as an out of class arrangement? If our education system demands memorization, than we need to look at it as nothing more and nothing less. We can't keep pretending that every student is able to derive equations. The successful students are excellent at quick and dirty fact recovery. They are not the creative young geniuses which society hopes they are.