> believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day.
This is sad, it confuses education with memorization. I was fortunate in winding up at Caltech, which had a policy of open book / open note exams. The idea wasn't to memorize formulae, it was to learn how derive the formulae and then apply them properly.
For example, in AMA95 one of the lectures went through deriving the fourier transforms. On the final exam one of the questions was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. If you understood the fourier ones, you could derive the hyperbolic ones. If not, well, you were lost.
In Physics 2, one lecture showed how the characteristics of magnetism could be derived from the idea of electric charges. An exam question was to show the characteristics of electric fields given the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Anybody can look up a formula in a book, and then misuse it.
This is sad, it confuses education with memorization. I was fortunate in winding up at Caltech, which had a policy of open book / open note exams. The idea wasn't to memorize formulae, it was to learn how derive the formulae and then apply them properly.
For example, in AMA95 one of the lectures went through deriving the fourier transforms. On the final exam one of the questions was to derive the hyperbolic transforms. If you understood the fourier ones, you could derive the hyperbolic ones. If not, well, you were lost.
In Physics 2, one lecture showed how the characteristics of magnetism could be derived from the idea of electric charges. An exam question was to show the characteristics of electric fields given the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Anybody can look up a formula in a book, and then misuse it.