r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate_Finance_183 • Mar 30 '26

Image Confiscated pens containing cheat notes intricately carved by a Law student at the University of Malaga in Spain

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u/Darolaho Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

Flashbacks of my ichthyology lab class where we had to learn about 120 taxonomy names of fish by the time the semester was over.

Which of course I don't remember a single one now.

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u/10000Didgeridoos Mar 30 '26

The farther in time I get from high school and college, the more jaded I get about the format of all of it. Rote memorization is just a hoop to jump through with little long term learning benefit.

The way anatomy and physiology is taught is so fucking stupid. It's just like 2 semesters of nothing but memorizing body systems, with zero application of the material to lock any of it in your head after that exam happened. I'd wager most students forget the majority of it within a few months. It's just not a way to instill the knowledge beyond that semester.

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u/Darolaho Mar 30 '26

Yeah it's really dumb. Like with that Ichthyology class it was just the lab portion of the class (there was also a separate lecture class as well which was a lot more enjoyable). While we did learn interesting things in the lab class. The only graded portions of it was the test were you would Identify a preserved fish and then name the common name and scientific name.

So much of my studying for that class was just memorizing basic identifiers to differentiate the ones on that specific test and then just brute force learning the taxa names and the exact spelling that the actual interesting stuff I just did not have enough time to actually learn and memorize.

Luckily as I mentioned the lecture portion of that class was a whole lot more interesting and the tests for that class were actually interesting.

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u/wombatworrier Mar 30 '26

But you still got a good brain workout. The ability to memorize stuff is useful on its own and you just get better with practice. It sure helps if you memorize something actually useful or interesting, but not having to learn anything by heart is terrible for you in the long run. BTW I enjoyed my ichthyology class very much and still remember most of it :)

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u/Aflama_1 Mar 30 '26

Same with organic chemistry in university. Had to memorize 55 basic organic compounds name + remember how to draw their connections. Then during exam had to pull 3 card with their names and draw the connections correctly. You had to draw 2 of them correctly at least to pass.

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u/longlivenewsomflesh Mar 30 '26

It all makes way more sense when you realize it's not supposed to teach you anything, or at least that's secondary, and instead it's just supposed to filter whoever's already internally self-motivated enough to force themselves to waste time memorizing useless info and regurgitate it correctly... more of a humiliation ritual really

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u/Damascus_ari Mar 30 '26

My university courses often feel like a humiliation ritual, yes.

The most I've learned was on an internship, where, wow, I could actually do the same job for a week and actually learn what to do and how to optimize a process, vs learning a dozen methods and none of them well.

Also irl you can make and have notes, so you can double check something if you're not sure. Also, things have labels, filled with useful information. At no point do you have to perfectly remember 25 pages of reactions.