I teach high school chemistry, and every year I see students memorize the periodic table like it's a list of celebrity names. But when I ask them to predict why sodium reacts violently with water while magnesium needs a flame, they freeze. That's why I believe memorizing the periodic table is a waste of time in modern chemistry education. We have apps and reference charts for that data now; what students actually need is the ability to think through trends and properties, not recall atomic weights from memory. Sure, some memorization builds a foundation, but spending weeks on it steals time from actually doing experiments and understanding bonding.