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Is Biology all about memorization? It seems some people are alluding to this.
Biology is a lot of memorization?
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It is funny how Biology works (At least this is how it worked for me)
At first Biology seems like a lot of memorization, and "knowing" something seems to be about quickly recalling memorized concepts and facts. But, for me at least, as time went on and I started to really put the puzzle together in my mind and feeling like I was really educated on a particular subject (as opposed to an information machine spitting out facts). This seemed to happen as I experienced all the different facets of Biology....For example, at first, it seemed like I was simply memorizing the parts to a cell and all of their functions. But after I worked with living cells in a lab, learned about Genetics, Biochemistry, Anatomy and Physiology ect.. It just all started to seem more tangible.
One particular case for me was a lab in which rabbit myofibrils were subject to different solutions of ATP and Ca++. When I saw the muscle actually contract under the microscope it was so real. Actin and myosin weren't just terms anymore they were actual filaments performing in the way I had memorized some time before. I think this is why most Biology classes have lab...it is to take our education to the next level, beyond simply memorization.
Sorry for the long windedness🙂
At first Biology seems like a lot of memorization, and "knowing" something seems to be about quickly recalling memorized concepts and facts. But, for me at least, as time went on and I started to really put the puzzle together in my mind and feeling like I was really educated on a particular subject (as opposed to an information machine spitting out facts). This seemed to happen as I experienced all the different facets of Biology....For example, at first, it seemed like I was simply memorizing the parts to a cell and all of their functions. But after I worked with living cells in a lab, learned about Genetics, Biochemistry, Anatomy and Physiology ect.. It just all started to seem more tangible.
One particular case for me was a lab in which rabbit myofibrils were subject to different solutions of ATP and Ca++. When I saw the muscle actually contract under the microscope it was so real. Actin and myosin weren't just terms anymore they were actual filaments performing in the way I had memorized some time before. I think this is why most Biology classes have lab...it is to take our education to the next level, beyond simply memorization.
Sorry for the long windedness🙂
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My fiancée and I have this discussion every so often. I'm obviously a biologist, and she's currently studying actuarial science (which is essentially a tweaked applied mathematics major). We've come to the conclusion that there are two types of knowledge in the world.
Biology, for example, is primarily a discipline of knowing, where the bugaboo is the amount of information we have to learn and retain, and the ultimate goal is typically to make some sort of decision based on what we know (in medicine or dentistry, for example, it's usually some sort of treatment).
Other fields, like math, are primarily disciplines of doing, where the focus is acquiring knowledge not of information, but of procedure. Their goal is to be able to somehow manipulate starting data to obtain the information in which they're interested (calculating significant differences, for example). One isn't necessarily harder than the other, but they're very definitely different.
Biology, for example, is primarily a discipline of knowing, where the bugaboo is the amount of information we have to learn and retain, and the ultimate goal is typically to make some sort of decision based on what we know (in medicine or dentistry, for example, it's usually some sort of treatment).
Other fields, like math, are primarily disciplines of doing, where the focus is acquiring knowledge not of information, but of procedure. Their goal is to be able to somehow manipulate starting data to obtain the information in which they're interested (calculating significant differences, for example). One isn't necessarily harder than the other, but they're very definitely different.
Biology does require memorization however doesn't make any sense without being able to sort out what you have memorized. It is much easier to learn biology by seeing it as a big story of how things work rather than "flash card" type memorization which is lost minutes after the exam.
I kinda wish that they (yes, The Great "They") taught us some of the broader concepts earlier on in bio, or at least introduced them a little better, so that the memorization could at least be linked to a real, over-arching concept from the start. I guess I'm more a proponent of PBL (also (still a newbie) wanted to verify that I have the right acronym: Problem-Based Learning, right?) than of what's called the more standard way of teaching/learning.
P.S. What's a good resource to find which schools are the most heavily into PBL? I haven't found one centralized source yet, and going through each school (or, like a million posts) to try to mine out that info seems a little tedious, so I thought it'd be worth a try to ask here. Of course, the tedium may be the only answer (as it is with many things!) or the most reasonable approach, so if others have found that to be the case plz tell me too.
P.S. What's a good resource to find which schools are the most heavily into PBL? I haven't found one centralized source yet, and going through each school (or, like a million posts) to try to mine out that info seems a little tedious, so I thought it'd be worth a try to ask here. Of course, the tedium may be the only answer (as it is with many things!) or the most reasonable approach, so if others have found that to be the case plz tell me too.
No matter how it's presented to us, how much is presented to us, and when they present it to us ALL of biology starts out as memorizing. It's just too conceptual to know it off the bat. You can't see it, it's exteremely complex, and not everything is known about all of it. So, they get you to memorize/learn the most basic material (though at first it seems useless and complex). After a while, the basic becomes everyday knowhow, and what used to be complex becomes a new basic.
As time progresses, and you indulge yourself deeper into biology/chemistry/physics, you find yourself actually learning the intricacies of the subjects. I mention biology, chemistry, and physics all together because they all intertwine with each other. To fully understand a lot of what is asked of us, we really need to LEARN at least the "basics" of those three subjects.
One specific case I can immediately spout off is Neurobiology. So many people have trouble with this subject because they lack the fundamentals of either chemistry or physics...disregarding it as necessary to understand former.
Seems like a lot of memorizing, but eventually it all becomes a learning process.
As time progresses, and you indulge yourself deeper into biology/chemistry/physics, you find yourself actually learning the intricacies of the subjects. I mention biology, chemistry, and physics all together because they all intertwine with each other. To fully understand a lot of what is asked of us, we really need to LEARN at least the "basics" of those three subjects.
One specific case I can immediately spout off is Neurobiology. So many people have trouble with this subject because they lack the fundamentals of either chemistry or physics...disregarding it as necessary to understand former.
Seems like a lot of memorizing, but eventually it all becomes a learning process.
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