Exercise in learning

My daughter needs to learn the name of all 50 US state capitals for a quiz this week. It is very difficult to memorize random associations such as states and their capitals, but even after you put the effort into it, it is very hard to make it stick in your memory after that pop-quiz. It struck me as an exercise in complete futility - why cram your brain with useless facts that you can just look up easily. My girl however jumped into this with gusto and seeing how much she really wanted to do well in that quiz I decided to help her in coming up with some strategies - index cards, the 50-capital song, a game on the internet, little interesting facts about the cities. In the process I realized something more important. Yes, she succeeded in memorizing some arbitrary facts but the bigger learning that happened here was that she learned how to learn. She might forget the capitals in a few weeks but she will never forget that there are multiple strategies you can apply when trying to learn something.