Jan Coffey wrote:

--- Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Jan Coffey wrote:

I never memorized anything by rote and I always did lousy in school but has always been very good at taking standardized tests. Why? The questions can be analyzed and wrong answers eliminated logically.


You have to have a lot memorized (even if it is not -as I said- by rote)


to be able to do this.


But you have to memorize math too - you don't just figure things out every time you do a problem do you?



Actualy yes, I do.


Unless you use your fingers every time you add, you have memorized basic addition.


No, I do it every time. And no, I don't need my fingers to do it. I can just
see it. Not that it is a vision, it's an abstraction, I process it every
time.


Really. What's the difference between your visualization and my memory? Are you saying your memory is so poor that you can't remember 1+1=2, you have to "visualize" it? Can you remember phone #s, and addresses?

Even if I did use my fingers I could count to 1023 on them anyway. :)


8^)

Do you figure out pi every time you need to use it?


No I do have pi "memorized" to 3 digits, but when is that suficient? It's one of those things I use a computer for. Why waste your brain on remembering something if you can look it up in the same amount of time? Knowing why pi is pi is what is really importat anyway.



Commutative, distributive and associative principals? Is everything in math _easy_ to figure out?



Yes, once you understand the idea it is easy to figure out.


Most of these
ideas are things we figure out long before we are tought them anyway. Being
tought them just shows us nuances we were never chalanged to dicover...and
lables, and in learning them we are chalanged to understand the reprocusions,
the next level.

Have you ever worked a rubix cube? You did right, you got the solutions and
you applied them like program.


No I got bored long before I figured anything out. 8^

Things are named in counterintuitive ways yes.

No, thing behave in counterintuitive ways. I remember being flummoxed by thermodynamics in chemistry - as was the rest of the class (but I don't remember why)

And there are areas which
seem...odd...seem not to quite fit, to not quite be right. I allways assume
these are becouse we are working with impricise models. But sometimes maybe
theyare just odd due to some incorect predjudice one must overcome.

Or perhaps they are counterintuitive.


Remembering the outcome of an experiement, or gaining an understanding of a system which you can then recal are differnt than memorization.

Remembering is different than memorizing? Must be one of those language tricks.

Besides we
can use tools to store much of this information. The kind of inforation you
are talking about now has structure. It fits into the abstract, and therefore
has nodes on which the information can hang. English is direct, brutal, flat,
there are no mappings, no associations, no structure.


There is no structure? Structure is no there? No structure is there? No is there structure? There no is structure? etc.

And though math may be governed by stricter rules, we use language much more frequently and thus memorize through familiarization.



Well, your "we" might, but my "we" doesn't.


Now that I can agree on. But you talk in absolutes as if everyone was your we. They aren't, but AFAIC, the more we's the better. 8^)

Doug

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