Use Tools, not Memorizing

As a former substitute teacher, one of my least favorite questions from students is "Why do I have to do xyz THAT way?" I've heard this question in terms of math: "Why do I have to do the problem with paper and pencil when it would be ten times quicker to use my calculator?"; in English "Why do I have to look up information in the book when I could Google it" or "Why do I have to handwrite the essay when it would be faster to type it?"; and in Social Studies "When am I ever going to need to prove that I've memorized my state capitals?" Sometimes I am able to give an answer - "You have to handwrite your essay because you are practicing for an AP test which has to be handwritten", but most of the time my answer sounds more like "You have to do the math problems longhand with paper and pencil because you might not have a calculator one day," or even worse, "Because those are the instructions your teacher left for me."

There are some things that I am very glad that I learned how to do the long way - how to round in math, how to calculate percentages for a tip, how to do deep research that is more than just a quick google search - but a lot of what I learned (and by learned, I mean was required to memorize "because you might need it") in school just makes me really good at trivia. I have never once needed to know off the top of my head what the capital of Florida is, and the only time in my adult life that I have needed to know how to long divide is when I've been teaching in third through fifth grade classrooms of students who are also learning how to long divide. When I have tools accessible to me, like calculators and computers, I am going to access those tools as a way to make my process of doing something quicker, or to double check myself. We need to accept that using tools like calculators and the internet are a fact of life now. We aren't doing kids favors by handing them a pencil and paper 100% of the time and saying "do it my way because you might not have a calculator one day." The world has changed - this is not student's reality anymore, and it just wastes their time. Instead of spending day after day teaching skills that they won't use past the school day because it's outdated and time consuming, we need to be meeting students where they're at. Yes, we absolutely need to teach them paper and pencil long division, and give them a basic rundown of what the state capitals are. But instead of spending all of the time to memorize, we need to teach them how to use the tools to do it quicker, and that will help them to deepen their forms of inquiry. When students spend all of their time double checking their memorizing (or memorize the fact without actually understanding it like this Atlantic article talks about https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/) , they have much less time to think about "what if" or "what other ways could I apply this" - they have less time to spend on deeper levels of thinking.

When we have a "Just in case" model of education ("you need to know this just in case you might need it one day") to a "Just in time" model that focuses more on application of what we've learned and pulling together knowledge found in multiple places, students will begin to shift to an innovator mindset.