I suspect this is the reason I did well in high school chemistry, physics, and bio–if you tried to really grasp the underlying concepts, the memorization required was trivial, or at least it didn’t feel like memorization.
This was my experience in physics, but didn’t feel at all true in chemistry and bio. I understood the concepts fine, but nothing about the concepts seemed to let me derive anything on the fly or avoid rote memorization.
One of the interesting things about taking both an intro to materials science course (basically solid-state engineering) and a more traditional introductory chemistry course targetted to roughly the same academic level was seeing the difference in the underlying approach. The solid-state chem focused on deriving the macroscopic behavior from the physical properties of the atoms much more than the trad chem.
I don’t think it was taught that way in chem or bio, but I tried to understand it that way… My parents have always bought me science books, and I had already read most of my high school library’s science section, so most of what I was learning wasn’t new. The concepts I was learning didn’t necessarily let me predict the other concepts, but they all fit together in a logical, meshed framework where they relied on each other, and I could use that to trigger my memory to retrieve particular concepts. Which is much harder in something like “nursing theory”, which a) I didn’t spend most of my childhood reading books about, and b) doesn’t hold together in a logical framework, except in some superficial ways.
This was my experience in physics, but didn’t feel at all true in chemistry and bio. I understood the concepts fine, but nothing about the concepts seemed to let me derive anything on the fly or avoid rote memorization.
One of the interesting things about taking both an intro to materials science course (basically solid-state engineering) and a more traditional introductory chemistry course targetted to roughly the same academic level was seeing the difference in the underlying approach. The solid-state chem focused on deriving the macroscopic behavior from the physical properties of the atoms much more than the trad chem.
I don’t think it was taught that way in chem or bio, but I tried to understand it that way… My parents have always bought me science books, and I had already read most of my high school library’s science section, so most of what I was learning wasn’t new. The concepts I was learning didn’t necessarily let me predict the other concepts, but they all fit together in a logical, meshed framework where they relied on each other, and I could use that to trigger my memory to retrieve particular concepts. Which is much harder in something like “nursing theory”, which a) I didn’t spend most of my childhood reading books about, and b) doesn’t hold together in a logical framework, except in some superficial ways.