Originally Posted By: Cathy A
Originally Posted By: Kriston
If you don't get it, then you're forced to rely on rote memorization for the doing, and that's painful for a GT kid.


It's not just painful, rote memorization takes a whole lot more effort (at least for me!) and is less "sticky" than understanding something. I think it's because when you just memorize you may learn a fact but it's just floating there in your brain, not connected to anything. It can be hard to retrieve that floating information. If I know how to reason something out it's like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to the memory. Each time I repeat the reasoning process it becomes easier to find and follow the breadcrumbs. If you think about something enough, the trail becomes like a superhighway leading straight to the answer.



Haha, this reminds me of taking beginning Accounting in college. I did very well in Accounting but memorized very little except for terms. Just before a test I would review one note which reminded me when cash was a credit or debit. As soon as I sat down I would write on the test when it was a credit. Everything else was a snap because I could relate it to cash one way or another. Other students struggled to memorize individual transactions and never could grasp the relationships easily.