[hoboon]

It's a good interactive method to constantly challenge yourself into remembering and learning material.

Basically, what you're supposed to do when you're actively reading material. I never really learned how to study until later in life but apparently this is how you're supposed to do it.

I think we don't see it a lot in many classrooms because of economy of scale. When I was in school, we had a professor who did this with his smaller class on computer networks but seems like maybe didn't in his larger classes. He'd ask questions but so many people trying to answer, less time for personal answers (which was fine with me since I was always the slowest person in the room).

[madaxe_again]

I was fortunate in my schooling. From 6-11 I was at a boarding school in the country, and we had classes of 12 or so at the most.

The three science and geography teachers (overlap, in the most excellent fashion) were autodidacts who believed everybody else could be too - and proved it in shovels. I recall the phrase "now why do YOU think ...?" being almost percussion in lessons - almost everything was "you figure it out and then let's bash heads and figure out what's right".

Nothing beat first hand experience. If we were studying population density, we'd be taken to a nearby town and would spend a Sunday measuring frontages and documenting usage, to then graph the data and draw our own conclusions. The fascinating takeaway on that was that houses nearer water were usually poorer - rich folks could afford to live up hills and have water carried to them. Properties get rebuilt, frontages have a habit of staying the same, or in multiples of their original size. Stuff I would not know or even think about were it not for this experience. Chemistry was always "here's the thing you need to do. Here's a mystery bag of reagents and kit. Figure it out. I'll keep an eye in case you stray into danger." Two examples, but it was the core of how they taught sciences - make us do our own investigations, and ask us the right questions to precipitate the correct lines of thought. They nudged me into coding the same way - "there are some dusty old BBC micros and some magazines about how to use them in the basement. You guys figure it out.". We figured it out so well that we got the machine with the vocaliser to cuss at the teacher when he entered input into a fake basic prompt, and went on to make a "Hugo" clone set at the school. Also just recalled being taught normal distributions by being told to go count car colours outside the school gates.

Anyway, the upshot is that from that class, of those I've kept in touch, all still have a childlike curiosity about the world, myself included.

I think we were taught to think for ourselves in the most earnest way - something which is increasingly missing in education today. Fuck, we were allowed access to guns, a deep lake with floating islands, abandoned underground cool stores - all on trust alone - and if you violated that trust you lost it, and you were punished. The bog-eye. Shudder.

[agumonkey]

Also there's a relationship between remembering and understanding. Sometimes just remembering a lot of premises is the only way to be able to really understand them later on (because they fit in your brain cache -- programmer analogy). Many times a concept became clear to me after a while, even though I did nothing special, but the pieces and their relationship became familiar enough to be meaningful. Some mathematicians said it better, it still feels weird anyway.