00:00
My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality.
00:10
This is a story about being forced to memorize things that were useless to me, in the period of my life between high school and most of college. But not all of this was not an era of my life. That was fun. And this era started actually this disdain for like this memorizing words started, when I think I was in sixth grade, or seventh grade, I had a teacher, substitute teacher, like a long term sub, this guy wanted us to I was teaching us about like government or whatever. And he taught us about the Magna Carta, like the first ever document between like a king and some people that tried to like, figure out a way to like, keep the king alive, and also extend his DNA into the future by creating an empire. And in exchange, keeping, like the roads safe for commerce or whatever, like the usual game of like, protect the homeland, and we'll you know, keep it safe, kind of a deal. Because with that kind of a system, you can you raise taxes, and we taxes, you can do things for the common good, which is a good thing to do. And I thought that was cool. Like, that was a great thing to learn about, okay, like the Magna Carta, first time ever, or at least in Europe, that this happened. But this guy, this teacher, wanted us to memorize the Magna Carta, as like part of this, like learning about the Magna Carta. And this was, I think, maybe not the first time but the first time, it really struck me that to a lot of teachers, memorizing things, was somehow learning them to this person, that's what it was if he could memorize the Magna Carta, and I thought in my mind, like, I'm never gonna design a country. Why do I need to memorize this document? That's the first thing I thought like, I'm like, Why, like, I'm happy this document exists. I understand that later became sort of part of like, the Constitution of the United States was like a great document like that. Those are good things. But why should I memorize this thing? That's not learning. And second of all, this document was written in the language related to English a long time ago, the words don't match the words that I know. And I barely speak English, I have to translate every word I say, from a picture of a sound into a letter into a word map to a flowchart. Based on sentence structures that I observed.
02:37
It's very hard for me to learn new languages. I've never been successful ever in learning any other language. And I've lived in other parts of the world. Because the sounds are different, and they don't match anything that I can see. So this person asking me to memorize this document in a language I didn't speak, even though to him, it was kind of like English. And like, you know, I guess maybe this guy wants, like Renaissance festivals or something and thought that was like, cool to watch. I don't know. But anyway, long story short, I did not memorize this thing. I didn't memorize one line of it. And I got in trouble. And this was, I think, the first time I got in trouble for not doing something like at school that someone wanted me to do. Because I couldn't do it. First of all, and I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it. Because it was dumb to make me anyone memorize something in a language they don't speak. Even if somebody didn't have the same kind of cognitive course that I have about language, like, even if they could memorize it, and they only understood 50% of the words, they still would understand 0% of the document. So why would you make kids memorize this, like even today? I'm like, what? And so this led to me like really considering with great disdain.
03:55
The kinds of things I'm being forced to learn in school. And I resented being forced to learn things that either weren't useful. Like, since I was never gonna design a country. Why would I need to like though the Magna Carta, and sure, history is great, and like we can learn and that's all good, but like, making me memorize it didn't improve anything in the world. So like, why why would that be, you know, critical to this guy. But it was, I guess that's the way he he learned. And so when I went to school, you know, high school and also college, was that was a hard period for me. memorizing these words, words that I didn't know or understand new kinds of concepts or new things, challenging for me. In high school. I knew I was going to go to University of Maryland or state school where I live. And at the time, it was the easiest one to get into. I had a low GPA. I like 2.8 I think which is below a B, which is where I live like low, okay, he's like competitive people here. We're super competitive about things like that. I never cared ever about a number that was supposed to assess my ability to understand anything. Because Who are they to measure me? Who are they to measure anybody? What game do they think I'm playing the game of a number. And I was surrounded by people that play these games so rounded 100% of the people that I knew were trying to get these numbers higher as if it to them that was some kind of like a competitive thing. He's numbers. And so there's a test here, that man, I had to take on LSAT tests. I knew that the minimum score, I needed to get on this task a long time ago, but I believe it was like an 1190, which was kind of high. Okay, back then, given my low score on the GPA, grade point average number, I decided that I was going to get the lowest possible score to get into University of Maryland, but I knew it was 1190. I was trying to get Exactly 1190 Exactly. The first time I took the SATs, I got like 1150 which was too low. And I was like, Oh, I undershot. And I thought, now I'm never gonna get into college, like catastrophe of life like in front of me. And then I took it again, I got like 1200 or something like that. Anyway, the point is, I got one higher than I needed to get to get in whatever, whatever it was. And I got in college, where I proceeded to despise memorizing things like chemistry, tables, definitions of words that I already knew, but in different ways, like position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, and friction, which I knew as colors and objects, but not in these words, and definitely not the mathematical notation. The way that it was explained to me, we already knew it in pictures, but not that way. And so I guess, being forced to, like try to understand these words, and being measured on these words, of what other people thought meant understanding was very frustrating to me, everybody learns differently. And there's a lot of things people know that they can't explain that they know. And there's a lot of things that people are taught that they don't need to know, in some kind of like framework of like, Oh, if you could just learn everything, you'll figure out what you're going to do. And I guess, more to the point of this project.
07:39
It'd be better to learn things in school that help people help me help anybody live their lives. Like a good example is like history. Like you learn history in school. That's good. Okay, history, all
07:50
these years of history, you have all kinds of history, every history of every, like, there's all the written history of every possible thing. How much time do we spend learning about the future? About the near future? How about like next year, or like, five years, like when these kids are going to get out of high school, or whatever, like the timeframe is where there's like a degree of confidence, that like there's some kind of way to have a trajectory of like, what would be useful to know later. Okay, so that when you get there, you're ready, as opposed to learning about the Magna Carta, because so far, I haven't designed a country. So Vlad, I have to try to remember that. So just some food for thought.
