An erudite reader, former Foreign Service officer Jack Aubert of Falls Church, Virginia, objected to a prominent feature of modern education.
“Rote memorization is very useful, and it was a mistake to discard it,” he said.
In a way, he’s right. Reformers frequently denounce memorization. They see it as drudgery. But it is hanging on. Creating memories is too much a part of humanity to die.
Reciting poetry was once a big part of school. My wife entertained me last week with stanzas from William Wordsworth and Sara Teasdale, passages her seventh-grade teacher, Lucille Neiter, insisted she commit to memory.
“Of course, I can’t remember what we had for dinner last night,” she said.
Stuck in my head is Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. That is because my college Chinese textbook was written by Yuen Ren Chao, a wonderfully offbeat linguist and the father of my Chinese professor. One of his chapters was nothing but the comic Carroll poem translated into Mandarin. I had to memorize it in both languages.
Aubert, about my age, said, “I memorized Milton’s sonnet on his blindness by the timed light of three matches (I was supposed to be in bed with the lights out sleeping) and can still recite it.”
That urge lives on. The great motives for memorization – music and stories – are as robust as ever. Far more young people are running around with wires carrying songs to their ears than ever before. The constant repetition can implant both tunes and lyrics forever.
This starts young, as it always has. Many parents have observed, happily or otherwise, the effects of the mega-hit film “Frozen” on their children. When that happened to my grandsons, I showed them my favorite animated feature, “Despicable Me 2,” and was gratified to see them soak it up, too. They quote it back to me.
When I was 10, I memorized all 20 verses of “The Ballad of Davey Crockett.” Spending my free time putting such stuff in my head was fun. So was much of what I had to recall in school. I have seen no research that memorizing can’t be enjoyable if done right. For children who have difficulty learning that way, teachers have other methods. But it is wrong to assume that going over the same fact or name several times until it sticks is bad teaching.
I know many teachers who encourage students to memorize. The other day, my 3-year-old grandson Tom chanted – without prompting – a six-part verse about doughnuts in a bakery shop he learned in preschool. Many teachers in higher grades still demand quick recall of multiplication tables, great historical events and presidents’ names, even if their education professors would have disapproved. Students need to remember more than they do now if they are to learn how to analyze their lessons and think critically and creatively.
Harriett Ball, the genius Houston grade-school teacher who trained the founders of the KIPP charter school network, noticed her students’ perfect recall of radio songs and composed her own, with the same driving beat, to teach algorithms and grammar. She quickly moved them to deeper understanding, but it was a great way to start. Many of the best classrooms around the country employ those rhythms.
Songs stuck in the head often reach the heart. I love Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” for the geography lesson in the second verse and the bracing acidity of the first verse. Life may not always be great for an American, but “at least I know I’m free,” the song says.
I sang it to my grandsons when they were babies, and occasionally since. They seem to like it. For Christmas, I am looking for more poetry they might enjoy. One book I saw includes Christina Rossetti’s Who Has Seen the Wind?”, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” and, much to my delight, “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Maybe someday they will read them to their kids enough times that they will remember.
