Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for August 15, 2018

One can only imagine some wizened elder in past times, lamenting that this newfangled clay tablet business will be the death of memory in children.

(Declaration: I’m on Team Lucy with this one – data is cheap, understanding is expensive)

Looks like u made an intelligent friend, Nancy. Now to get her to do your homework……..

So it’s not what you know, but how you ask that counts.

Ms. Jaimes has also captured my argument against allowing children to use calculators before their freshman year in high school. How can anyone truly understand the essence of any form of math without performing the calculations by hand, thus working true understanding into the brain?

And as she walks and texts, she walks into a light pole, falls over into a puddle and rolls over into what a dog left by the fire hydrant.

Honestly, I usually like Jaimes’s strips, but this one would have worked better if she’d just written “ingenuity definition.”

Because memories don’t crash and keep going when the power goes out.

Until the power supply dies, that is.

At least Nancy knew how to spell ingenuity.

7

I really enjoy the comic today, but it also leaves me a bit philosophically conflicted. On the one hand…. I do agree with the idea that memorization for the sake of memorization is a foolish concept in many ways…. especially for older learners (probably 12 years or older). But at the same time, as Olivia is (I believe) also suggesting…. there is inherent value in SOME memorization.

The way I tend to look at it is…. learners (young or old (including of course adults)) should memorize things that add convenience to their day-to-day work and day-to-day learning. Examples would be…. memorizing the fingerings on a musical instrument, memorizing the definitions of words, memorizing basic arithmetic, etc. This should be the obvious reasons to memorize things…. convenience or enhancement of day-to-day activities.

But, a lot of folks tend to be polar (all-or nothing) sorts and think that either you should memorize nothing (which IMO makes everything too ephemeral) or memorize everything (which IMO is time wasting and also can impact time for deeper thought in analysis and creativity).

The “happy medium” is what we need… some things are great and important to memorize, some things are superfluous to memorize. The difficulty is finding that balance… especially when technology can shift that balance over time.

Nancy has a lot in common with Sherlock Holmes:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that this little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for any addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

As a supervisor to over 80 people once, my boss gave me the best advice ever: “You’re not expected to memorize all 300 or so pages of policies, rules, regulations, etc especially since they change frequently. But you are expected to know where to go to get the information. So memorize where to look when questions come up”. This was a job where I had to be able to answer a policy question within a minute or two as my agents (those under me) were on the phones with customers and needed to get through the call in a reasonable amount of time.

It worked! I memorized which topics were in which policy manual and could easily flip to the chapter/page to get the answer. When the policies were updated, which were often, I made sure I updated my manuals immediately so as not to have outdated info if one of my agents happened to have a question about it that day.

To this day my motto about most things is, know where to get the info and that alone can be difficult in the age of Google because not every source is accurate so you also have to ensure the info you’re getting is from a valid source. That part helped me pass college with all the papers we had to write.

Soooo….how exactly did Nancy learn to spell “ingenuity”?

10 years in IT and my best qualification is that I can Google better than the average bear.