Is passing more important than understanding?

Editor's note: Shulman is a Herald student columnist at Kennedy High School, which has students from Bellmore and Merrick.

When it comes to school, my philosophy is that almost everything follows the “10-year rule.” That is, in 10 years, nearly all students will probably forget almost everything that they have learned unless they continue to use the knowledge they have acquired. Because of this, classes cannot be based on rote memorization.

Any class requiring more than a small amount of memorization will serve no purpose in most people’s lives 10 years from now. Instead, school must be based around critical thinking. Critical thinking is what makes students question things, solve problems and ultimately become smarter. As a result, even if you have forgotten everything you learned in high school, hopefully you were challenged to think.

Forcing students to memorize facts without understanding the concepts behind them is pointless and does not make students better people. After a test, all of the information leaves the student’s head. Granted, there are some things that can and should be taught by rote memorization, such as the multiplication tables. In high school, however, I see little purpose for memorization.

High school is when students need to learn to understand, not just memorize facts for a test. Understanding gives students the ability to succeed in the real world. Few things at a person’s job directly apply to what they learned in school. If students are not taught to think critically, they will not be able to succeed at anything that requires them to perform tasks that they have never seen.

Students cannot just be memorization machines, and teachers cannot just be fact-givers. All of school must make you think, or it is a waste of time. Some students struggle in classes such as physics. That’s great – it means they are thinking, and that is the point of school.

Taking the thinking out of classes like math and making the class into memorization is a horrible path to go down. If your children have completed trigonometry, ask them if they memorized the “OHOLO” and “HOLOH” tricks for drawing trigonometric graphs. The answer will probably be yes. Then, ask them if they know and understand the unit circle, the basis of trigonometric graphs. The answer will probably be no.

As your children begin to select next year’s courses, encourage them to take challenging classes that will make them think, and even struggle a little. These courses will make them successful people, even if they can’t score an “easy A” in them.