this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Why is this something widespread? I did chemistry up till A-levels and no one ever asked me to memorise the periodic table and no one gave a shit about committing it to memory. WTF is going on.
It's common in the US. Our priorities are... Misaligned.
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.