My dad was a good storyteller. Unfortunately, as he grew nearer to the end of his life, he told the same stories over and over. But one of his stories always tickled me. Dad told of a time when he was in grade school, shortly after the first World War, and the nun assigned the kids to memorize “In Flanders Field,” a popular poem from the war.
Dad absolutely could not get it, so he was sentenced to stay after school every day until he could recite it. That was a problem, too, because he lived three miles from school and had to walk home alone every night.
Then, one day, after he’d been sitting sullenly with his head down on the desk, he noticed a framed picture of the poem on the wall next to his desk.
“Sister, I can do it!” So he read the poem off the wall, and he was free.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place; and in the sky/The larks, still bravely singing, fly/Scarce heard amid the guns below.”
Memorization. Why should kids memorize? If they need information, they can go to the Web, right? Memorization is a difficult, painful activity, right? But memorization is not without its merits! I think kids need memorization because it delivers unique cognitive benefits.
When I was teaching freshman English, I always had my kids memorize the prologue to “Romeo and Juliet.” It was just 14 lines in perfect iambic pentameter and not really very hard to learn because it gave a quick summary of the play. To this day, years after that exercise, I still have former students who will come up to me and begin “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene …”
Memorization is important for many reasons. It’s a great mental exercise. It’s great to have the ability to have essential facts and figures at your fingertips and not to have Google them: multiplication tables, vocabulary items, spelling lists, grammar and usage rules, mathematical and scientific formulas, prayers, etc.
I was struck by a letter to the editor in the State Journal a while back. It was written by a citizen of Stoughton on the occasion of the anniversary of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address. The writer, Sue Tarpinian, said, “If you have lived in Stoughton for any length of time, you have probably heard the Gettysburg Address rendered wonderfully by lifelong Stoughton resident Carl Sampson. He has recited it every year at Memorial Day services since he memorized it in high school. Carl is now about four score and seven years old, and he’s been doing this for over 60 years. Carl has never been to Gettysburg National Park, but his deep feelings for the address are clear to anyone who has heard him.”
Is that cool, or not?
I remember memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution, “Casey at the Bat,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” declamations in forensics, lines for plays, the periodic tables, and all kinds of stuff when I was in grade school and high school. Memorization was a valuable part of my learning process.
I think that every step I took to learn anything was a valuable step and that the literary passages I memorized provided me with a wealth of words. It helped me to have models of sentence structure, word choices and imagery, which provided a basis for my own proper use of the language.
Our brains have a magnificent potential for storing information, both utilitarian and aesthetic. We should exercise our cranial muscles just as we do our skeletal ones, and memorization is good exercise.
A few years ago, Marilyn and I had an opportunity to spend a wonderful 25 minutes alone with the great actor Hal Holbrook in his dressing room after a Madison performance of his “Mark Twain Tonight.” When I told him I’d seen him perform about 10 times over a period of about 40 years and that each show seemed fresh and new, he said that it was because he had memorized over 13 hours of Twain’s material, so he could pick and choose according to what he perceived his audience’s tastes to be. Amazing!
Go out and memorize something. It’ll do you good.
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