this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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It's common in the US. Our priorities are... Misaligned.
Our education system values rote memorization over actually learning something. So instead of teaching you how to use the periodic table, they teach you "The element of Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1" etc.
A few teachers who actually give a fuck will do both, but they are required to teach the test for funding. Because that's how they are graded.
Common in Brazil, fucking hated it
It hasn't been common in Brazil for many years already.
Things change.
Then I envy you guys, back in my time there were a ton of 'songs' to memorize all the important elements. Hated chemistry because of it.
Oh, I memorized most of it too. And it has always been almost completely useless.
But even though kids this days are spending almost all their time at school, this is something they are not losing time with.
I went looking for a CSI Miami pun, but came out very... *puts on sunglasses*
disappointed
Omg my high school had 2 chem teachers and both were insane and took the class too seriously. The first week was making us memorize the elements and being drilled in almost daily tests to see if we could write them down.
By the end of the week, my teacher said if you didn’t have at least an 8/10 from her quizzes, to basically change classes. She and the other teacher often went overtime and ignored the period ending bell which pissed off a lot of other teachers.
The periodic table of elements was on a paper that she’d roll up during our quizzes and for the rest of the year, we had to take our quizzes with the assumption that we’ve memorized the tables and could do equations and conversions with no references. The class had to be graded on a curve since most of us 16 year olds had other school work to focus on.
In the end, I think no one from those classes ever became a chem major. It certainly made me hate it.
I've also heard of this happening in the US. Although in the course of my B.S. in Chemistry they always gave us a Ptable for exams.