Ivan Seeking said:
I did hear one example that worried me a bit. A friend who was a nuclear engineer with GE for decades, was once telling me about a young engineer that couldn't remember the definition of the sine of an angle.
I also caught my buddy, a senior engineer [now retired], reading a freshman level chemistry book for his job. Never going to let him live that one down!
It's funny and sad at the same time. Funny mostly because I can relate to it. I used to like to help with some of the chemistry HW help questions (the math questions I could help with used to get jumped on too quickly for me to have a chance) because it forced me to stay refreshed on all that material I was quickly forgetting from disuse. With folks like Borek and Chemistree around, my feeble attempts are no longer very helpful, so I've backed out of that completely for some time now. Now I look at those HW Help thread every so often and realize that even with a Ph.D. in hand, I couldn't even do most freshman chemistry problems anymore, in spite of having a minor in chemistry! I've certainly lost most of my skills in calculus.
But, that's why I keep hanging around here. I'd probably have forgotten a LOT more if I wasn't reading along here. I think the adage is true...use it or lose it. And, I think it speaks to how poorly we really learn things the first time around. This is one of my new areas of research, but it's taking me time just to figure out the background literature. I'm trying to find out what educational methods best lead to long-term retention. We think we've learned a subject just because we can pass the exams in the course, and there are a LOT of educators around who are content to think that if students can pass a cumulative final exam, they have satisfactory long-term retention of knowledge presented in that course. I'm not quite satisfied with that. I think long-term retention means more than just being able to pass an exam you've studied for recently, but being able to pass that exam months or years later when you're no longer studying for it. Or, maybe there's no such thing. Maybe you'll always forget things if you don't use them or need them often enough.
Here's a new thought (for me). Does previous experience with a subject help you to RE-learn it faster if you need it again? So, you say you can't even remember the basic definition of a limit. But, how long did it take you to really learn it the first time? And, if you for some reason needed it again, how long would it take you to learn it again? I suspect that your previous experience would make it easier for you to "brush up" and learn it again just by reading about it if you ever needed to learn it again.
Here's another example from personal experience. Most of my research experience has been in endocrinology/reproduction. For the most part, this has landed me in physiology departments. Currently, I teach anatomy. When I first stepped into the anatomy courses, I'm pretty sure people thought I was crazy. Anyway, I picked up a lot of it REALLY quickly. This time, people (the anatomists) were surprised, and that's how I got my current job, by really learning anatomy quite quickly. Now, I'm being asked to develop a new course that is a combined anatomy and physiology course (this is a commonly taught course elsewhere, but our university has generally kept the two disciplines distinct). Even as I read the textbooks available, I realize there are very few people who really can do both well...the texts either get the anatomy right and the physiology MOSTLY right, or the physiology right and the anatomy MOSTLY right, but don't do both really well, at least not for all the organ systems. So, as I'm preparing for this new course, I'm looking back at the general biology course I taught ages ago, when I was still in grad school (I think I found PF after that, or close to the end of that time). I looked at that material, because the first year I teach this new course, biology will not be a pre-requisite for it, but a co-requisite. After the first year, we'll be able to put the rules in place before students are admitted, so can make biology a pre-requisite. Anyway, I was viewing it from the perspective that the first year I teach the course, I'm going to have to incorporate the basic biology material the students will not have had prior to the course. As I looked through my old notes from the course I used to TEACH, I was surprised to realize how much anatomy I had covered in that course. No wonder I learned anatomy so quickly! I had taught it before, but just forgot how much I had taught! Granted, I was using the fetal pig, not human cadavers, as the subject, but most of the content was the same. A few terms differed. Some of it, I remembered teaching before, but not all of it.
So, the point of my long-winded story here is that while you may feel bad about what you have forgotten, if you ever do need it again, having learned it once before is very likely to make it easy to relearn it if you need it again. The human brain is quite interesting in its capability for remembering what we need and ignoring what we don't need, but is still buried in there somewhere.
.
