Rap is also lyric-intensive, and its rhymes can be used as a device to help with memorizing facts.
"Teachers can get bored and boring if they forget that they are fundamentally intellectuals working with ideas, not just testing kids for memorizing facts," Dr. Kohli added.
But such activities are revolutionary in India, where public school students have long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful year-end exams that many children fail.
In other words, he said, he studied cynically for the exams, memorizing facts, quotation and "handy arguments" that he had written on index cards, and then regurgitating them on the tests.
(Her stock-car science quiz is at nytimes.com/tierneylab/) "So many kids lose interest in science because we've been teaching them that it's all about memorizing facts," she said.
What They Don't Know In science and social studies, what the students learn seems less important than how they learn: taking notes, finding main ideas, memorizing facts, reading aloud.
