Reflections on memorizing over retaining

Callie Pautler, Editorialist

By April and May is when the school year for most students start to come to a close. During that time we try to reflect on the new things we learned throughout the year. For some that might be easy to think of, for others though it may be a little more difficult seeing that everyone learns differently.

Teachers seem to cater their teaching to certain types of learners. Not everyone is able to retain the information they get the same way. Most of what schools have us do is memorize information rather than to understand it, because of this after we memorize something a majority of the information is soon forgotten. 

The district has certain materials and ideas for what the teachers teach and how they teach it to the students. So much information has to be thrown at students in a small amount of time that all they have time for is memorizing the material and not really understanding it or why they have to do it in the first place. Not only that, but some ways of learning don’t work for different types of learners. There’s auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners and much of the time teachers only focus on one way of teaching their students, which may not work for everybody. 

Of course there’s not much for the teachers to do about the matter, and they are aware of the students who aren’t understanding like the rest, so they have to find solutions themselves to help the students. If students are behind with trying to learn something, it puts everybody else at a pause. The teachers have a difficult time just like the students. 

There’s not much that could be done to fix this problem. If the district changes the way students have to be taught, then there would be a higher success rate than there is now. Changing the curriculum would be a way too difficult task so teachers should just try to help their students as much as they can.