I had to memorize every element until Radon in 2nd Semester. Just position and therefore the amount of protons (the "order number"? idk in english), but still: such a waste of time. When we asked "y no table of elemens?", our prof said that we should be glad that we had a system to memorize.

I asked a chemistry teacher about this and he was baffled that we had to do this.

The best part? I wasn't even studying chemistry! But rather general "engineering science" which had a lot of focus on material science. But chemistry was my least favourite science. I wanted all engineering but chemisty. ;_;