Memorize This[Posted by David Miller] LISTEN TO "Memorize This" (24MB MP3)  If you enjoyed the drama of young people on stage under pressure, if it's been a while since you heard a heartfelt rendition of "Pied Beauty," or if you're simply in the Salem area and you don't have any other plans for this Saturday afternoon, you might consider heading to the Poetry Out Loud 2008 State Finals. This is the third-annual incarnation of a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. It involves the "memorization and recitation of classic and contemporary poetry" and culminates in a national contest in April, but it's the memorization itself that has gotten us thinking. Large-scale memorization in schools seems to have gone the way of the mimeograph machine or the dunce cap. There are those who celebrate its passing, arguing that creativity and critical thinking can't thrive in a culture of rote learning. And there are those who long -- even just a bit -- for a now-lapsed golden age, one in which students everywhere could recite poems, give the Gettysburg Address, and rattle off times tables until they ran out of oxygen. (That's the way it was, right?) If Poetry Out Loud represents a tiny backswing of the anti-memorization pendulum, it also provides a nice excuse to talk about what exactly we lose -- and what we gain -- when we store fewer facts and figures and quatrains in our heads. Have we become more creative problem solvers? Better users of search engines and libraries? Are we poorer for not having specific literary or historical storehouse in our brains -- a personal library of synaptic connections that no internet can rival? Do you remember your parents' phone numbers, or have you outsourced that memory to your cell phone? Has Google supplanted your memory? What have you permanently filed in your brain -- and do you wish there were more? GUESTS:
Photo credit: Gaetan Lee / Flickr / Creative Commons
In his poem "Forgetfulness," Billy Collins discusses the idea that learning something new displaces some other thing we used to know. He says: "even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay." I started memorizing poetry in college and even now, I like to tell myself that my ability to recite sonnets by Shakespeare and poetry by Hopkins, Dickinson, and Frost explains why I can't name all the presidents anymore, or remember the outcome of various world wars.
While a golden age of memorization is clearly going to be hard to find without going back to the pandits of the classical Sanskrit period (see Staal on Orality and Literacy, for a great study) the lack of such a time in recent memory seems a bit of a straw man. No, there was no such time, but there was a time when we were expected to learn more than we are today, and prior to that, a time when even more was required.
Is this a bad direction we're going in? The fact is that failure to memorize certain facts cripples the intellect and makes any real learning impossible, or at least highly unlikely. A music student who doesn't memorize his scales and chords will be severely hampered in their playing, no matter how clever their fingers. Someone who hasn't learned their arithmetical tables will be unable to understand the ways in which numbers relate to each other, shutting them out of most serious thought on public life. (although they will think they know something because they listen to public radio, they will only know what they are told, not what they think) Anyone who hasn't the ability or interest required to commit to memory the dates of historical events has not a hope of understanding the relations between those events, and thus will be entirely ignorant of history - and again, shut out of serious thought about current political events. And someone who doesn't memorize a poem will never hear the whole poem, which is only heard when you can hold the whole thing in your head at once, and their life will be much poorer for it. The ability to track down trivia instantly is a pretty poor substitute for a curiousity about the world, if you ask me.
As a mother of young children (8,5 and 5) I am amazed at their interest in, and ability to write, poetry. While their typing/writing skills are not up to doing it without a "scribe" they are able to write some pretty interesting freeform poetry, and then memorize it. I won't share a lot of it, but I will share our family's current favorite. It was written by Kathleen, one of the 5 year-old twins.
In many ways, it is part of what makes our family us, that we have memorized our family's poetry, and can recite it together on the "Frog Bridge" close to our home. I am sure when we move away, we will still think of it as the frog bridge when we recite the poem. Goodbye Frog Oh Frog, I didn’t get to say goodbye So this is the way I will say goodbye Oh Frog, I miss you I really wanted to say goodbye But I didn’t get any time So maybe I can read this poem where you live That is close to here And some frogs will go around me And you too Maybe all of them will go around me Ribbit, Ribbit So, goodbye. By Kathleen
BTW, as the daughter of an English teacher, I am thrilled we are talking about this. As the sister of a math teacher, I am distressed that we are talking about poetry on Pi Day.
If you are one of the unfortunate people who has not yet celebrated Pi Day, here is a place to get started. http://www.piday.org/
As a poetry teacher participating in Poetry Out Loud, I don't see anything distressing about discussing poetry on Pi Day. I try to do some cross-disciplinary work in my English classes, and the rhythms of poetry offer a marvelous opportunity to incorporate math. For centuries poets (and their readers) have been good counters and measurers. Why accept the traditional fragmentation and departmentalization of the academic world in the past century or so?
Just this morning I was listening to a Dharma talk with Thich Nhat Hanh who told a story about when he first entered the monastary at age 16. He was handed a book for verses and told to memorize all 50 of them. Having had what he referred to as a "Western understanding" of memorization, he thought the exercise was useless. But after memorizing the verses, he found that he was able to utilize them in his daily business to practice mindfulness. Without the memorization of the verses, he would have been lacking a key tool in his Buddhist practice.
On aother note, during a camping trip last summer, I lost count of the times my friends and I said "Oh, we'll just google it and find out!" forgetting for a moment that we were out of wifi range in the middle of Central Oregon. We were wishing we'd committed more information to memory.
While I believe we have become too dependent upon search engines and the internet, our cell phones phone list and our email address book, I also do not believe there is intrinsic value in memorization of poetry for the sake of memorization. Students with better memorization skills will do better in school; it is how I passed all my classes, because I did not study. This doesn’t mean memorizing a date for history, or a poem for English will actually help the student. Critical thinking is much more important. In the case of math there ARE benefits to memorizing simple formulas, multiplication tables, etc. Shouldn’t we be teaching students, especially ones growing up in this information age how to THINK not just memorize?
Of course students should be thinking beyond rote memorization, but there are certain pieces of information that are invaluable to have memorized. The alphabet, for one. I still use "I before E except after C" to proof-read my emails. My husband is a carpenter and uses math formulas on a daily basis.
I completely disagree with this. Aside from the actual item that is being memorized and the value that this may have (whether that value be realized today or 20yrs into the future), there is the very important value of exercising the brain. I was not an English major and in fact did not derive much pleasure from my English classes during High School & College, but now 16 yrs later, I fully appreciate the value of all that memorization that I was "forced" to do at the time. I now inadvertently memorize many things and am surprised at how this part of my brain helps me in my work and at how automated this feature truly is. I wonder if it would have been developed at all had I not had the teachers I had, that required us to memorize the things they did. I strongly believe that memorization is an integral part of thinking; it creates a catelog of facts for your brain to sift through at a later date when that information is then needed, a skill that is very valuable for any line of work and a skill that is very helpful for any social interaction. Think of how quoting a simple line of poetry in politics could make or break a situation...
I agree that memorization can detract from more important skills and concepts. We don't have enough time for all of it, and if memorizing displaces thinking or understanding, we lose something valuable.
On the other hand, memorizing poems, quotations, formulae, facts, and dates can enrich our minds and enable richer discourse.
My 4 year old daughter likes to memorize a lot of things. She memorized a whole book which has 32 pages (it's a picture book, but kind of long) when she was 2 and half. Now she memorizes a couple books from the beginning to the end with only a few mistakes. She also knows lots of dinosaur names.
I know small kids have good memories, but my daughter's memory is really good compare to the other kids. I would like to know how memory will work at school and if my daughter will be always with good memory.
How do we as a society decide what poetry we should learn? It seems without sharing the exact poem then a shared body of knowledge argument is not valid? It would seem spending time on general knowledge instead of exact knowledge would be much more beneficial to society. In history its much more important to understand why and how instead of when. Critical thinking does not come from memorizing dates in history or poetry but from a lot of knowledge from a lot of sources.
Memorization is CALMING. How lovely it is to recite a poem, prayer or mantra (in my head or out loud). It relaxes the tension in my body.
Memorization is also part of the process of internalizing knowledge. Thank you to Caren for reciting her poem, not only was the recitation spectacular, but you made me think outside the box about how to recite poetry. This will help me with my student teaching! Michelle NE Portland
Over 20 years ago as a high school senior in Worthington, Ohio, my first day of AP European History started with the teacher asking us to take out a blank sheet of paper. He instructed us to freehand draw the map of Europe labeling all political boundries, mountains, rivers and bodies of water. This was an exercise he repeated every week of the course. His belief was that we couldn't understand history without understanding geography. It has proven extremely valuable over the last 20 years in following current political events. The map has changed quite a bit since I was a high school senior but as recently as 5 years ago, I could still draw that map!
The power of memorization goes beyond our ability to externalize the things we know- like quote a poem or passage. The greater power of memorization is the ability to internalize the influences we want to emulate.
As a child I watched my dad memorize scriptures. As I was able I too memorized scriptures and although I have memorized two books of the Bible and some other large segments, I pale in comparison to my dad who memorized the entire new testament in english, half of it in Spanish, and continues daily memorization to this day. The power of internalizing these things is our ability to apply something quickly as life happens. Most households have several bibles, works of poetry, plays by shakespeare. How many of us are influenced by them in our daily life? All of us who memorized them. When everything else is taken away, do we long for our gadgets to look up our own identity?
When does memorization replace critical thought? Your father has achieved a monumental feat of memorizing a very large and difficult work however when was the last time your father or yourself thought critically about the work you spent so much time memorizing? The bible is not a very logical or well thought out work, what happened to the many childhood years of Jesus? I'm not trying to start a theological debate but rather make the point, that in your case in in school it would seem memorization is replacing critical thought.
I know you mean well. I am a software analyst, I spend most of my days working and living in critical thought. I serve on the boards of directors of a several non-profits and have standing invitations to serve on others.
The bible is full of examples of how to apply religious conviction to the challenges of daily life in a illogical world.
I agree that memorization can detract from more important skills and concepts. We don't have enough time for all of it, and if memorizing displaces thinking or understanding, we lose something valuable.
On the other hand, memorizing poems, quotations, formulae, facts, and dates can enrich our minds and enable richer discourse. Ghangas' point--that the memorized material becomes an integral part of the life of a memorizer--is indisputable. The question you raise is whether we do anything more than merely memorize material. I think we should--and I think that memorizing it can enable mental agility just as often as it can detract from time to think.
Memorization is not just committing something to memory. It's also mental exercise. Repeatedly lifting weights is boring, but it builds a strong body. The same is true of the mind.
Mark Twain's wonderful book, On The Mississippi, describes the prodigious feats of memorization achieved by Mississippi river pilots in the pre-civil war era. They had the whole river memorized, and not just one version - they had it in daytime, at night, low water, high water, flood stage, etc. The goal was that you could take a river pilot out on the bridge any time, anywhere, and he would immediately know where he was and where he needed to go. Now that's a strong mind! Another example: fighter pilots have to know a large number of complex procedures to operate their airplanes. These all have to be memorized. As a child, I aspired to be a fighter pilot, so I read books about fighter pilot training. Part of the training involved running an obstacle course, getting hosed down with cold water, while reciting fighter plane operating procedures at a shout. If you can recite the procedure under that level of stress, you've got a shot at doing it correctly in the midst of air combat. I teach in a college-level technical field, and I see a lot of incoming students with weak minds. They seem not to have gotten enough mental exercise in K-12. Too much "critical thinking" and New Math, I guess, and not enough hard mental work.
I’m not much of a poetry guy but I’m real big on kids learning how to train and operate their mind and body and have confidence in themselves and learning how to train their memory is useful not only in poetry but in sports and nearly everything else.
Skiing deep powder requires that you pick out and memorize the path you want to take down the mountain because after you start you’re skiing blind with the snow going over your head, it’s like skiing on a cloud. Sometimes racing a slalom the freezing fog blows through, covers your goggles and blinds you and you have to keep going with the confidence that you memorized the course perfectly, so one mistake in that memory can make you fall. Memorizing poetry is maybe the easiest way for all kids to learn how to train their brains to memorize and gain that confidence so I’m all for it. |
03/13/2008 9:26:00 PM
