Reply To: Lesson 4-2: Automaticity vs. Memorization

[Heidi Warrington]

The differentiation between memorization and automaticity is super helpful for me to learn more about since I was a student who was very quick at memorization and later, figured out the meaning of what I had memorized. For a long time, I thought that was just the way math was — that children were ready to memorize but needed more time to understand rather than building understanding and then that leading to automaticity. It’s hard to convince parents, most of whom learned math through memorization, that reciting memorized math facts is not the gold standard of elementary school. Our elementary teachers often have trouble with parents teaching the algorithms to their children when they are working on visual models.

[Heidi Warrington]

The differentiation between memorization and automaticity is super helpful for me to learn more about since I was a student who was very quick at memorization and later, figured out the meaning of what I had memorized. For a long time, I thought that was just the way math was — that children were ready to memorize but needed more time to understand rather than building understanding and then that leading to automaticity. It’s hard to convince parents, most of whom learned math through memorization, that reciting memorized math facts is not the gold standard of elementary school. Our elementary teachers often have trouble with parents teaching the algorithms to their children when they are working on visual models.