[hinckley buzzard]

Judging from the last few decades' worth of results in the sciences from American education, not many students even know what's inside the box much less anything about "outside the box."

"Conceptual mapping" without an internalized critical mass of factual information is like trying to learn a foreign language without knowing vocabulary.

[cripplecreek]

All they’re teaching in school is repetition and they’re creating zombies. I always preferred teachers who challenged me.

One of my favorite teachers taught us bar tricks and the physics behind them. Sometimes he would give us a few random objects and tell us to bring them back tomorrow and demonstrate any scientific property we wished with them but we had to explain how we arrived at our conclusions.

Repetition is fine for memorizing the periodic tables or physical properties.