Is Learning At MIS Purely Memorisation?
By Emilio G.R., Grade 9
One day in class, I was talking with my friend, when he said that Biology was his least favourite subject because it was full of memorisation. That conversation got me thinking, is everything in school just memorisation? Because of this conversation, we ended up debating for and against the idea of schoolwork being solely memorisation between the 2 of us.
But first, we needed a definition. There are two types of memorization. Firstly ….
Memorisation is the process of committing something to memory or learning something by heart. (Oxford Dictionary)
Secondly, Psychologists define subconscious memorisation as memorisation which occurs without deliberate effort, like remembering song lyrics you’ve heard many times, recognizing faces, or picking up habits and patterns.
The first point that came to my friend’s mind was the idea of Biology class relying heavily on memorisation, with units generally requiring you to memorise anything about the being that’s currently being studied. While I won’t deny that in some cases Biology is pure memorisation, the subject as a whole isn’t. The memorisation is done to lay a groundwork so that when a challenging problem arises, such as ‘How an organism will adapt to a change in its environment,’ then we can apply the knowledge we’ve practiced to solve the problem leading us to answer the question.
After this, we talked about Maths. I asked whether he believes that Maths is memorisation; and after his response of no, I questioned whether he knows the idea of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by heart.
After he answered yes, we continued to argue with each other so that we could ultimately come to a conclusion.
To respond to my point of math functions being memorised, he asked me if I have memorised what 73 x 36.25 is. I responded no. the idea of this point was to argue for the idea that while functions, which are memorised, are the base of maths, those functions are applied in new situations to find different and answers.
This idea became our definition, which we decided to try to prove once more with one last subject, English.
At first glance, it looked like there was nothing to argue for English being memorisation, but after brainstorming for a while I proposed the question of “Do you think about how you structure your sentence when you speak English?” At our school, English is the primary language, meaning that not only is everyone expected to at least be converse but English classes are crafted for this type of crowd, with them not bothering to teach us any of the basics. How is it then that we still manage to speak and write accurately? Its because we have these basics subconsciously memorised. That being said, you still need to apply these memorised basics to new situations to form the English subject taught at school, so English isn’t purely memorisation.
With the analysis of these 3 separate subjects, we can now come to a conclusion.
These arguments condense to the idea of every subject having a base level of memorisation, with the bases of some subjects being larger. This being said, the bases are just bases, which get built upon to from the subject as a whole.
So, is school memorisation? Yes, but only to a certain extent.
