[Coda]

Originally Posted by Potironette

..I guess mostly it's just testing that makes me want to slam my head into a wall. And throughout class I'm pretty haunted by the knowledge that another multiple choice exam is headed my way. Regurgitating information for other subjects is actually kind of fine for me, because it doesn't feel like regurgitating information--since it all makes sense. On the other hand, history seems to have a different kind of sense that I'm not quite getting.

Yyyyyyup.

In math classes, you're not merely memorizing facts. Yes, that's part of it, but the very nature of studying math is about developing specific skills, and the facts are merely in support of that. You don't have to memorize that 2 + 2 = 4 when you know how addition works. If you fail to memorize the commutative property of addition, you can still figure out on your own that 4 + 2 = 2 + 4.

Science and language classes still manage to latch onto this. There's a lot more vocabulary to memorize, a lot more stuff that seems arbitrary on the surface, but there's still a structure there, and as you build up the skills to work with the information, you can still get meaningful results even if you don't know the word for it.

History isn't a set of skills that build up from another set of skills, with facts that support those skills. History is facts first, and the abstract skills necessary to work with those facts are by and large unrelated to them.