MEMORIZE OR PERISH!

Professor: What is a machine?

Rancho: A machine is anything that reduces human effort

Professor: Will you please elaborate?

Rancho: Anything that simplifies work, or saves time is a machine. It’s a warm day, press a button, get a blast of air. The fan…A machine! Speak to a friend miles away. The telephone…A machine! Compute millions in seconds. The calculator…A machine! We’re surrounded by machines, from a pen’s nib to a pants’ zip – all machines. (Demonstrates with his pants zip) up and down in a second. Up, down, up, down…

(Gets stoned with a chalk by the professor in annoyance)

Professor: What is the definition?

Rancho: I just gave it to you sir.

Professor: You will write this in the exam? This is a machine – up, down… idiot! (mimicks his zip demonstration) Anybody else?

Chatur: Sir, machines are any combination of bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained and by which means, force and motion may be transmitted and modified as a screw and its nut, or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley valley about its pivot, etc especially a construction more or less complex consisting of a combination of moving parts or simple mechanical elements as wheels, levers, cams etc.

Professor: Wonderful, perfect, please sit down

Chatur: Thank you

Rancho: But sir, I said the same thing in simple language…but sir, one must get the meaning too. What’s the point of blindly cramming a bookish definition?

Professor: you think you’re smarter than the books? Write the textbook definition mister, if you want to pass.

(Culled from the movie “The Three Idiots”)

This is not strange to most of you who have memorized your textbooks yet cannot put what you memorized to practical use. I know I encourage you to read but you need to understand what you are reading. Knowledge is not memorization of facts and figures. Knowledge is accessed through research and application. Let whatever you read make sense to you. A machine is anything that reduces effort, reciting the whole textbook in a bit to define it does not change the fact that it is anything that reduces effort. Our teachers may demand that we quote them or the textbook verbatim but that should not rob us of our basic understanding of theories, terms and concepts. This is the problem with our learning culture and this is the reason we have graduates who cannot turn their certificates to solutions. You are the future and that is why you must begin now to question the source of your knowledge and try out the principles you have been taught in solving the problems around you. By the way if you haven’t watched the movie “The 3 Idiots,” you are missing.

Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense     - Anonymous