It's easier to verify rote memorization than actual understanding so naturally shitty schools focus on the former at the expense of the latter. Most American schools are shitty by academic standards.

In Spain we did have to memorize it. Truly idiotic. People just invented mnemonic phrases to get through the exam and that's it. It served no educational purpose whatsoever.

My teacher, in germany, used memorising it as a punishment. Like four dudes in my class had to do it.

Czech here, also had to memorize it. But our school system here is 90% just memorizing shit, it's a fucking joke.

In Lithuania we literally have the whole periodic table on the wall in every chemistry class I have ever been to.

My school was barely 15 years ago, but we also had a thin book handed out to us in 7th grade or so that contained charts and references for pretty much everything in a very condensed form. Periodic tables, formulas for math and physics, chemical and physical attributes for a bunch of materials, ... And the entire ASCII table for some reason.

That was in Germany during the 00s and I still have that book, and three or four copies I stole over time.

Memorizing the periodic table is probably the high-school assignment I'm most angry about to this day.

In America, we didn't have to truley memorize it. For tests we had a reference packet that included the table.

That being said we did have to memorize a few major ones.

Its also important to recognize education is a state by state thing, not federal. The curriculum in Texas can be different than the one in Florida. Even teacher to teacher, I could see one class having to memorize it while the one next door doesn't.

It might be, I didn't take chemistry in high school but those I know who did spent weeks memorizing it.

You were lucky. Many education systems around the world still use memorization instead of comprehension as a measurement of learning.

American here - we didn't have to memorize it. All we had to do was know the groupings (Noble gas, metalloids, etc)

Phosphorus, sulfur, ...?

My undergrad biochemistry course was taught team taught by a microbiologist and a molecular biologist because the biochemist got fired for sexually harassing a few students.

The molecular biologist was a cool guy and taught concepts. I got an easy A in that section.

The next few weeks were taught by the microbiologist. That asshole wanted us to memorize a ton of different pathways on our second midterm (cyclic acid, fermentations, photosynthetic,, MAPK etc..). Something like 20 total. I took an F on that one.

Luckily the final was a standardize test that all universities in the state used that year. So I ended up with a B.

Same.

So during the test the teacher listed element names out loud with no pauses, and you were supposed to write down the symbol while she was speaking, and then another list in reverse. After the last element we had to immediately put the pens down. Whole test took ~45 seconds for 30 elements.

This was so that it was impossible to read from the big table on the wall, you had no time to look away from the paper. You'd miss the next 3 elements by the time you looked away to find the one.

School is supposed to prepare you for solving chemical problems in a tent in the woods with nothing but paper and pencil and meager rations.

Involving civilization, literature and tools is entirely unsuited for the end goal.

I have nothing against calculators. But I have taught some elementary and jr high school math classes in my old a feeble age. The "why can't we use calculators" and " what do I need to know this for" was a constant whinge I had to listen to and deal with.

Why I want you to know how to solve a quadratic equation isn't because that's what you are going to do for the rest of your life. But rather, I want you to see something like that in the far future and go "Oh, I know what this and that it isn't gibberish. And I can whip out that smart phone I got and google it to find the howto steps to solve it." And I want you to acquire the discipline to learn things. Besides, just knowing what 7x3 is, makes everything else so much easier to learn in math. That removes fear and stress point and builds the confidence to tackle more complex ideas.

I probably own more calculators than most here. So, I'm all for them. And I did always allow any student to use a calculator in class. I would just hand you a slide rule.....(and yes, I'm that old to have used them in class as a kid and I still own a couple). But, when I was teaching, I really wanted my students get their fingers dirty with the numbers themselves and to learn how those numbers work. While getting the correct answer is very important, as a teacher, I was perhaps less concerned with the correct answer and more concerned with HOW you got that answer. Because if you know what you did to get that answer, you are far more likely to get the right answer than the wrong answer.

In the end, I think education needs to be approached from the idea of making learning more fun. No matter the subject. Sadly, that's a very difficult trick for any teacher in the typical class room to accomplish.

Chemistry fans: And obscurium is really cool, because it has three stable isotopes right near each other, but it's not really useful for anything...

Chemists: why are my results so weird? Oh, right - hydrogen can have a neutron sometimes.

Luckily I had a teacher that thought it was bullshit we had to memorize the whole table and "forgot" to cover the wall-sized poster of the periodic table during the exam

That's stupid, who the fuck needs to know about antimony

Most chem PhDs don't even know the whole thing lol. We had to memorize just the symbols in high school, but positions weren't required. In my grad-level inorg course, the first test was a blank table that we had to fill in, but even then the f-block and transactinides were not required.

But, consider you're stranded in the wild. All technology lost due to an accident. It's just you, nature and your skills. How will you know then for how many days the melons you've foraged will suffice if you've found N of them and eat one a day? /j

That was a short answer that turned out to be mostly wrong. The longer answer is "if you don't understand how this works, you won't have the intuition to notice when you get absurd results from the calculator". If you don't have that intuition, then when you inevitably make a small usage mistake on a calculator (or in matlab or wolfram alpha or whatever), you'll end up not realizing that you got a clearly wrong answer.