When I first took college Physics I barely passed the thing with a ‘C’. To be honest, I think that I had a ‘D’ but my ‘A’ in the lab brought the grade up to a ‘C’. The lecture always made sense to me IN class (but not on the tests), yet I had the best Physics teacher in the University. The guy was a legend, and I LOVED his jokes. So why could I study for his class and barely pull a ‘C’…and why was I making an ‘A’ in his lab?!?
I had a rude awakening during that semester of college and it was the fact that there are some things in a class that you must memorize and other things that you must understand. But let me take it a little bit further.
The things that I had to memorize had to be memorized and then placed into an area of my brain to recall later for further development of future material. In other words, if I memorized it today, I had to keep that info handy to recall it in order to build upon a new concept next week. Let me give an example: Let’s say that I memorize the fact that mitochondria make energy for human cells and that ribosomes help cells to create proteins. Anyone can memorize that. I learned that in Chapter 3. Now, we are in Chapter 19 and the teacher tells me that Red Blood Cells do not have mitochondria or ribosomes. I can memorize that too. This is where a basic science stops and more intense science starts. It’s also where your memorizing must now shift to understanding. I must now take what I learned in Chapter 3 and 19 and “think about what does this mean?” This is what understanding is: when you can ask the question “what does this mean” and apply a solution. This means that Red Blood Cells cannot make proteins or large quantities of cellular energy so their lifespan is relatively short and they should not be able to repair themselves like other cells.
I have a RPG for my Playstation 2 that I really like but I never play it because it simply requires too much understanding. It requires me to think long and hard about my every action, and each characteristic of the game. Everything that you do at any given point of the game will determine your experience in the game. Fortunately, it is simply a choice as to whether or not I want to play it. But passing Physics was not merely a choice–it was mandatory. So I had to figure out that the equations were things to be memorized, but the concepts of how they could be used to measure how matter and energy and motion and force interact had to be understood to the point that I could understand the basics of accelaration and gravity and resistance. In any science class, you need to figure out what facts are just facts to be memorized–but expect to use those facts to uderstand concepts later.
