Education reform should start in the classroom, with the relationship between teacher and pupil. In this vein, high school math teacher Ben Orlin’s recent Atlantic piece “When Memorization Gets in the ...

Mathematics education in the United States puts far too much emphasis on memorization, says Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler. And that ultimately leads students to both misunderstand and ...

In my 29 years of teaching, I have often reflected on the balance between memorization and understanding. I recall one conversation where a math teacher shared the belief that “memorization no longer ...

The idea of rote memorization is bound to tick some people off, which makes for nice discussion and debate. In all the very legitimate conversation about critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis, ...

Virginia Heffernan’s recent Times piece in defense of the pedagogical value of “drilling” made me wish, momentarily, that I’d gone to school during the American heyday of rote memorization. Recalling ...

Around this time she talked to a former business school mentor, who mentioned reading that the American POWs who endured captivity during the Korean War had stayed sane by using their memory. They’d ...

The article argues that in a rapidly changing world, children's ability to think, ask questions, and explore is more valuable ...

The recent article by Chronicle reporter Ericka Mellon about how schools are dropping weekly spelling tests in favor of teaching methods that focus less on memorization and more on understanding why ...

But at the root of all of those quick hacks is the basic truth: There’s no substitution for practice and rehearsal. Rote memorization is a necessary evil–and how could it really be pure evil if it’s ...

A few years ago, I was directing someone who was completely new to acting. This man, we’ll call him Al, was having a terrible time memorizing his lines. There were times during the first performances ...