The charge of rote-memorization levelled against spelling-bee & geography bee players is not isolated to those two types of contests. A QB player's benefit from memorization is no small one. Who has not considered the lists of Nobel Prize winners, national capitals, Carleton's 'Frequency of Mention of Titles' database, etc., & not wished that he JUST KNEW the lists cold? How much easier that would make life! Some players DO memorize these lists. Is there anything greatly wrong with that? Not that I can see. The distinction to be made is between two types of KNOWING: 1) List-memorizing which because of its superficial nature is considered cheap & 2) the sort of absorptive learning that most of us do by reading books, watching the History Channel, looking at Internet porn (maybe that's just me), etc. A good caveat on this score can be provided by the poet David Citino who mused in a recent essay: "I ask myself how I've come to know the things I lay claim to. How much have I learned myself? Very little, I fear. I have had to take nearly everything on authority." Whether that authority is Principia Mathematica or a list out of The World Almanac, it is still second-hand. List-memorizing is but another way of acquiring knowledge, a way not entirely irrelated to reading books and taking classes. (Although I am sure we can all agree that we'd prefer people to read Principia Mathematica.) Perhaps my point that list-memorizing is not a pernicious evil has been overstated---after all, it is a slight evil. It's just that all this talk criticizing memorizers in spelling-bees & geography-bees strikes me as amusing hypocrisy; QBers memorize, too. (Besides, in the New Jersey state geography bees I tried memorizing and I still got thumped. I have respect for those bad-ass 13 year olds.) Erik
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