Recently I had the pleasure of visiting my grand-daughter’s fifth grade class.  Knowing that I work in the STEM field and was once a college professor, the teacher had the students recite the entire periodic table – all 118 elements – in unison.   They also understood that these were the basic building blocks of our world, and that molecules and sub-atomic particles had a key role.  I was impressed.  Never in my lifetime have I memorized the periodic table.

Not that I didn’t have to memorize things as a grade-schooler.  I still recall bits and pieces of Shakespeare (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?…”).  I can also recite nearly all 272 words of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address (“Four score and seven years ago…”) with reasonable accuracy, although I have no idea why that is still loitering in my brain.  The whole thing took Abe about 2 minutes to deliver, while the other speaker at Gettysburg that morning, the famed orator Edward Everett, spoke for two hours.  I was not the only 5^th grader grateful that Abe’s words were the ones that loitered in history.

In today’s techno-culture, there are many who question the utility of memorizing literature or history – after all, Siri can recite Lincoln’s famous speech or any of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets on request.  Can’t we find other more useful things to spend time on in school?  Perhaps something a bit more practical, like coding, or even network security.  On the other hand, much is written about how technology is robbing us of the ability to generate original thoughts (see, e.g., Brain Drain).  As a child of the technology supernova myself, I can’t help but wonder whether all that memorized stuff in my brain is just wasted storage, with no delete key and oodles of external backup. <continue reading>