I know I shouldn't be picking on people's education and blaming the schools for the I-D-10-Ts I come across, since it is largely the parents who are the most responsible for what kids learn as they're growing up. But at the same time when I blame the school's its not so much the teachers that I want to blame. My aunt is a teacher at a school, and had the "core skills" thrust upon her a few years ago.

Now she has a hard time teaching any of her students, mostly because she's forced to show them 4-6 different ways of completing problems in a single "period". The kids don't even have a chance to fully grasp the first problem before she has to move on to the next which has a whole different concept. It's ridiculous and leaves her 3rd graders more confused more times than not. Add to that the removal of special education classroom, and her classroom having more special needs students than the prescribed number of special needs aids and she's left overwhelmed at how she's going to get the kids to understand even just one new concept before they leave her classroom for good.

She manages, but often by the skin of her teeth and by offering "parent tutoring" afterschool. So the parents of her students can learn what the children are learning to be able to help them at home. She lives in a very poor county where the parents are more worried about putting food on the table and keeping the heat on in the winter, but thankfully a lot of them take advantage of her "tutoring" and will help out their children's friends even.

So about the only good thing she has to say about it, is it has brought a close knit community even closer together! But even she bemoans for the days of math drills. This whole "kids don't understand why they're doing it, they're just memorizing the information..." Guess what, all knowledge is memorization. Not a thing in the world isn't learned through memorization. Even a baby crying for food, comes to memorize that this cry gets them food sooner, this one gets them a dry bottom sooner, as mommy's memorize the different cries and act accordingly.

It's just as you memorize more and more about the world, you "seem" to make "instant connections" that show an underlying ability to "conceptualize." When all that's happening is the brain is making connections to stored memories, enough experiences and memories have taken a similar enough situation and made a connection so you don't have to "think" about the answer. So when you start jumping to "concept" without any memories to back it up, of course you're confusing the heck out someone.

It goes to the whole "Describe an egg to an alien who has never seen one before." Naturally most people choose to go with it's oval, white, can fit in the palm of the hand, has a yellow yolk.... but even mammals have eggs in their ovaries, no one decides to describe that to the alien. And why do we always jump to the classic white chicken egg when told to describe an egg? Because of our memories, our memories have associated egg with white chicken egg... we know there's brown eggs, we know there's speckled eggs, there's tiny blue robin's eggs... but the brain has memorized and connected the general word "egg" with "white chicken egg". We don't have to sit there and think, well what kind of egg should I describe? Should I describe all the eggs in the world to the alien...

It's the same thing with math. 1+1 is 2 we add to the memorization 2+1 is 3, our brain jumps to the conclusion 2+2 is 4 since 2 is 1 greater than 1 and 4 is 1 greater than 3. Some people it takes a few more memories than others to make that jump. Sometimes you have to go higher the number scale, but they will eventually get it baring some terrible disorder that prevents it.

It's the same with our letter and letter sounds. I'm dyslexic, but I still learned to read in much the same manner of any other kid, just with a whole lot more memorization going into the process. My peers were able to simply memorize letter sounds and phonetic rules... I had to memorize the whole word. It got a lot easier once we began on prefixes and suffixes as I could pick the "smaller" words out of the great whole and sound that part out with the root word. But at the same time, I always rocked it on the "sight words" tests while my peers took a bit longer to figure those ones out since they didn't follow the rules they had memorized. Sad part is I even memorized the rules though they don't mean diddily to me.

Anyways.. where was I going with this I don't remember

Sorry I was a few classes away from a bachelor's degree in psychology when the MS finally took over on me and stopped me from those last 3 classes. And I had a hard earned 3.8 GPA, not hard earned because I studied forever to accomplish it and wracked my brain at every turn, but more because I simply refused to get a 4.0 and end up as the "inspirational crippy" at the graduation. My brother and sister both had to make their speeches at graduation thanks to their 3.9 and 4.0 GPAs respectively. I wasn't going to take any chances and I still was darn close to be called upon to speak when I graduated with my multi-associates.

But I helped a lot of students, even students in different programs with their work for classes I wasn't even enrolled in. And yeah... people memorize things and convert that to knowledge, that's just the way the brain works. Give them enough to memorize and they'll just take off with their learning. Memorizing the bare bones of Greek and Latin can turn a D average nursing student into an A+ student seemingly overnight. Words they couldn't define, couldn't even begin to tell what part of the body it was suppose to be in or what was going on, suddenly boom, not only can they define the words and tell you where it is in the body but they can make new connections with their memories allowing them to be to define just about any medical term out there.

Which is why until only a few generations ago, they used to teach Latin and Greek in preparatory schools. To prep you for college, for medical schools and really basically any form of higher learning outside of perhaps the liberal arts where Latin and Greek is still the basis of all the terminology. Memorize that and you don't have to memorize a medical dictionary.