I've spent the last decade teaching AP Biology, and every year my students ask why we still make them memorize the entire Krebs cycle when they can Google it in seconds. Memorizing metabolic pathways builds a mental scaffold that makes later concepts like diabetes or cancer metabolism click faster, but I've also seen brilliant kids who never memorized a single enzyme and still aced the final. What actually matters for understanding living systems—knowing the steps by heart or grasping the big-picture logic of energy flow?