【凤于九天第23次作业8.19】Issue28

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TOPIC: ISSUE28 - "Students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have learned only facts have learned very little."
WORDS: 613          TIME: 00:40:53          DATE: 2008-8-18 20:47:01

According to this statement, students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. While I admit that students should study the ideas, trends, and concepts to help explain the facts, I contend that to memorize facts is also important for learning. Furthermore, experiences sometime can only be learned by memorizing various facts.

First of all, the ideas, trends, and concepts are very important for students to explain the facts and learn from the facts. The main idea can help students to achieve the quick understanding of the only facts. Thus they can learn the facts according to the clear background and the main clues. For example, in the scientific courses, many basic knowledge are conducted by series of experiments. The ideas can tell the students the aim of these studies and why these facts happend. Then, the students can learn the facts more easily.

The trend can provide background of the development of specific facts and allow for comparing different facts to achieve better understanding. The history courses can illustrate this point. What the students should really learn is how the history facts are conducted and the force behind them. The trends can tell the clear evidence what is the position and role of a specific fact in the whole development. For example, the sun-centered theory is totally wrong in today's view. However, if provided the trend of development of the theories of universe, we can simply learn that this theory's importance and meanings.

Concepts can explain various professional terms and allow for accurate understanding of facts. Studies of the concepts is necessary in various courses like physical science and philosophy. For instances, we cannot understand the fact that apple fall onto the ground unless we know the concept of gravity.

However, while ideas, trends and concept are very important for students to learn and explain specific facts, students can learn the ideas, trends and concepts from the facts they memorized. In fact, there is no causal relationship between facts and ideas, trends as well as concepts. They should be taken as an entity. The ideas, trends, and concepts comes from various facts that have close relationship. Memorizing many facts of students can better help them achieve the precious understanding of ideas, trends and concepts. For example, students always need to memorize hundreds of great literatures, especially the classic articles before they can learn the ideas, trends and concept of writing. The studies of ideas, trends and concepts can also help them better understand the facts they have memorized. Thus, they can learn how to write good papers.

Furthermore, many experiences can be learned by memorize many specific facts without clear trends and concept. Experience sometimes cannot be learned from textbooks, or even from talking with others. You must learn by do it and memorize the fleeting and precious facts. For example, in the experiments of life science, sometimes you would face serious problems as well as failures that cannot be explained. The way to solve these problems would be memorize these situations and try to eliminate these possibilities. These knowledges are very important for a prefessional student. But you can only learn it by memorize as more facts as possible.  

In conclusion, the ideas, trends and concepts play pivotal roles in learning. However, there is no need to learn these before memorizing facts. Memorizing facts and learning the ideas, trends and concepts can benefits each other. Students should emphasize both of them. In addition, there are something we must learn from thousands of facts, which cannot simply be explained be ideas, trends or concepts. That is why we call these knowledge experiences.