Reading Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform while experimenting with ways of teaching vocabulary in a meaningful and memorable way have led me to reflect in my extremely rare free moments on memory and memorization as learning devices. I'm interested in readers' recollections of what they had to memorize in school, of what stuck and what did not. I'm interested in what memories readers have of memorizing, and what memorizations they can still recite. I'm interested in what value, if any, readers would assign to different kinds of memorization (the times tables, poems, the presidents, and so on). And I'm interested in whether readers think there are certain speeches, poems, or literary works that ought, as a matter of course, to be committed to memory--as a matter of mental discipline, or as a matter of cultural heritage, or both.

Comments are open.

My two cents:
Some things MUST be memorized, addition facts, times tables, foreign language vocabulary, conjugations, etc. Whatever specific drill, method, pedagogical technique used, this kind of memorization is indispensible.

I don't remember much specific (cultural) memorization, and can't separate what I may have absorbed after school from what I memorized in school.

Seeing what our daughter did in elementary school, I'm convinced that memorization is a valuable technique. The kids memorized age suitable material, both content and difficulty in different grades, and as early as third grade were memorizing and acting roles in simplified versions of Shakespeare. The mental discipline of memorization pays dividends beyond being able to show off.

Some things I think should be memorized by the end of high school (a very sketchy start).
The Gettysburg Address
The Raven (at least the first part)
The Declaration of Independence
The Bill of Rights (so they wouldn't spout nonsense about censorship)
One or more of Churchill's stirring war speeches
Some of Shakespeare's soliliquies.

I'm sure others have longer and better ideas.

I'll have to give it some more thought (since I have my students memorize and recite poetry as part of my lesson plans), but here's the first memory that came into my head: the 'helping verbs'. Is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, have, has, had, do, does, did, shall, will, should, would, may, might, must, can, could.

Junior high. Don't know why we needed to remember them, I just remember them - they're a little rhythmic trivia in my head from what I'm sure was a much larger grammar lesson.

Off to reflect. Hope there are more comments soon!

Too many things to list. I went to a religious school where a good deal of emphasis was placed on memorization in both religious and secular courses. By the time i graduated, I knew various segments of the old testament, talmud, and more recent judaic writings by heart, in addition to all the usual American founding documents, multiplication tables, poetry, vocabulary words and irregular verb conjugations in three languages, etc.
I'm guessing I could spit most of it back now, but I really haven't ever had any reason to do so. Virtually all of the memorizing i've done has had absolutely no payoff beyond earning me a couple of A's on grade- and high-school exams.

Oh man--parts of speech raps. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but, good God, did those things stick in my mind. Some of the effect is lost in writing, but I recall...

[to be half-sung, with rhythm]

Pronoun:
If too many nouns have got you down
A real pro drives them out of town.
And if your noun has lost its lustre
Pronoun's a perfect noun-buster.

Verb:
I'm a verb and my main attraction
Is the way I spur you into action.
If you want to move or just plain be
A verb is a super source of energy.

Adverb:
Adverb!
Triple duty word!
Verb, Adjective, Adverb! (this, of course, in reference to the parts of speech an adverb can modify)

Preposition:
I'm a preposition
Wanna know my mission?
To indicate how words relate
Often through position

Conjunction:
I'm a conjunction
Joining is my function.
And, or, nor, but, for
Since, because, and many more.

I can't seem to remember any for nouns or adjectives...

There was also a little song for common linking verbs. To the tune of "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush" (I think...)

Appear, become, continue, feel
Smell, sound, taste, and be
Grow, look, remain, and seem
These are some linking verbs.

In studying Spanish, I had a truly great teacher in high school who used the "Rassias Method" of memorization/repition to help us learn new verb forms and integrate new vocabulary into our spoken repertory. The method, as I recall/understood it, was to hear a phrase--sometimes a long one--repeated quickly, first by teacher, then by student, in combination with a small movement or semi-theatrical gesture. For longer phrases, the students would hear the final portion of the phrase first and would then gradually be encouraged to work backwards and add on more of the phrase untill the entire thing was fluid and comfortable. Ususally, after hearing and becoming ready with certain words, forms, and phrases, we would write dialogues involving the new vocabulary and act them out in pairs. Without question, I remember all of those dialogues. But lo, I have said enough. Take care.

In high school and college, in my mountaineering days, I memorized vast chunks of verse (Robert Service, some Shakespeare, folk song lyrics, other verse) that I'd queue up with the first line...the notebook that had the first line prompts has long since disappeared--I couldn't recite to save my life.

I believe that kids should have math facts (addition and subtraction) by ? 3rd grade and keep adding. For a great many kids, a rap or a hand-clap or some kind of body movement to add to the memorization is very helpful.

Kids memorize easily--look at how well they soak up the jingles--so delete the jjingles and add the facts they need. It just needs to be made into a chant or jody.

I suspect that I'm younger than the other people who have commented, as I was required to memorize practically nothing. In 10th grade we had to learn the first ten(?) lines of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Whenne in Aprille with hir shores sote tumpety tumpety something about a roote and longen folke goin on pilgramages for to see strange strondes.

Obviously that didn't stick. However, in 11th grade we had to memorize a poem. I chose The Raven, which worked out so well that I did it in 12th grade, too. I can still recite most of that. Random lines of German poetry seem to be surfacing, as well as part of the Aeneid, so the foreign language teachers must have had us do something.

My parents, on the other hand, are able to rattle off an astounding amount of poetry -- Robert Service (my mom's rendition of "'The Cremation of Sam McGee" was a big hit with us kids), Robert Burns, Longfellow, as well as bits of famous speeches, plays, and so on. Quite a dramatic shift in classroom requirements between their time and mine.

Memorization of poetry/literature was not a large part of my education. But memorizing various mathematical facts and relationships was - SOH CAH TOA, anyone?

I was also good at English vocabulary, though less so at French (mostly for lack of good study skills). However, I do remember the French verbs that use "to be" as an auxiliary, instead of "to have" (there's a little ditty to sing).

But, I can't repeat more than a few lines of any poem, which I do sometime regret.

Jonathan Spence's book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is a fascinating look at an earlier method of memorization. Cicero mentions the memory palace technique in De Oratore but doesn't give any clues about how to use it.

I pretty much agree with the comments above - kids should memorize multiplication tables, some great poetry, some famous speeches, foreign language vocab., rules of grammer, etc. While memorization can be overdone, it is an essential part of a good education, both to learn useful stuff and as mental exercise.

What do I remember memorizing from my days in grade school back in the 50s and 60s? Multiplication tables, certainly - the rules of grammer, lots of vocabulary, some French. The schools were just starting to adopt "progressive education" then (I suffered through New Math, which still had a lot more real math in it than the truly awful Chicago Math that my kids have to suffer through) so there was not as much emphasis on memorizing famous parts of English lit as there should have been.

I attended a Catholic parish grammar school and a Christian Brothers high school until my junior year. Memorization was an integral part of my education.

There were the usual mnemonic devices for spelling and grammar; i.e. ìíií before ëeí except after ëcí or in case of ëaí such as neighbor or weighî, and the times tables, etc.
Also, as an altar boy, there was the litany and the ëConfiteor Deoí as well as the responses we were expected to have learned from the ìBaltimore Catechismî.

I once had a rather ardent Irish nationalist priest who had us memorize "Easter 1916" which resulted in my lifelong enjoyment of Yeats. It also came in handy when I lived in Ireland and people were called on for their "party piece."

One of the neat things about shifting from college teaching to high school teaching is that I've learned a lot about how the brain works. There has been a lot of research on memory and it boils down to this: the more you connect bits of information to other bits of information the more likely you are to remember the whole set. Which is why, if you are my age, you can sing the constitution or the times tables (thank you Schoolhouse Rock)but have a harder time just saying them, the music, visuals, and words work together to help you remember the whole set.

As a history teacher what do I expect kids to memorize? Not dates, hardly useful. Sequences, yes but specific dates in isolation no. (Example: 1776 gets a lot of play, but only makes sense if you know that the shooting started in 1775 before the Declaration of Independence was written). I assume that the suggestion to memorize the Declaration was not the whole thing. My students and I had to read through it together, out loud, with me explaining just about every key word. For example "He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing imporance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them."

So when we talk about memorization, I have to ask, are we talking about rote memorization (which is difficult without tunes, visuals like flash cards, etc.) or are we talking about all types of memorization - that is how we take in and retain information?

For me the significant piece of this is the connections to other bits of information bit. If I can get kids to connect for themselves bits of information to other bits that are contextual (as opposed to, say a jingle or a visual) I'm doing my job in helping them make sense of the past.

Oh yeah, I expect them to know where each of the fifty states is on a map.

John Derbyshire (of NRO) says that he memorized a lot - but then, so did everybody else when he went to school. And before that, everybody (at least, those who went to school) memorized hundreds of lines, of Shakespeare, Browning, Byron.

One of the few I remember doing is Kilmer's "Trees".

It sounds as if there are two tracks here, one, memorization for fact ("in 1493, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea" - not always perfect), and the other, memorization for the sheer pleasure of it (perhaps a bit of masochism?)

I think it's the case that memorizing long passages - of good material - helps bind the form and expression into your mind.

At least with Spanish, memorization helped me remember some parts of speech, such as "si yo posiero" meaning "If I had (owned)" - which meant I always remembered the "If I (verb modified thus and so)" construction. (It was a song I translated for the fun of it.) Basically, it made a framework.

Memorization of words or poems never stuck with me.

But I can still amaze my friends by filling in a blank map of Africa, which I had to memorize in 7th grade for a test.

I memorised the multiplication tables, foreign language vocabulary, and some poetry for school. Simple stuff, and mostly when I was in lower and perhaps middle school. Nothing in high school. I'm young enough (and went to schools, ah, "modern" enough) that most of the serious memorisation I ended up doing was at home. Memorised a lot of Shakespeare (famous soliloquies and whatnot) on my own time, as it were. So also with poetry, Latin epigrams, historical dates, etc. And of course, I memorised loads of piano music. This was all quite recent for me, though, so I can remember most of it.

"At least with Spanish, memorization helped me remember some parts of speech, such as "si yo posiero" meaning "If I had (owned)" - which meant I always remembered the "If I (verb modified thus and so)" construction."

Except that it's "si yo poseyera" - "poseer" is irregular in many tenses and follows the pattern of "creer." The preterite third person plural of "creer" is "creyeron"; of "poseer" it's "poseyeron." Therefore, their imperfect subjuntive forms are "creyera" and "poseyera."
But even if you had memorized a regular verb ("si yo hablara," for example), it wouldn't help, because without knowing that the imperfect subjunctive is formed according to the preterite third person plural, having learned the form by rote memorization would trip you up when it comes to "irregular" forms, which are not really irregular if you understand the rules by which the imperfect subjunctive tense is formed.
IMHO, this example is more useful for demonstrating the hazards of memorization rather than its benefits.

Since everyone agrees that memorization is just dandy I wouldn't want to be the skunk at the picnic, but...

I grew up believing I was stupid, and remember school as an endless, grinding ordeal because I was just never able to memorize tables of "facts."

Later I discovered that I am severely dyslexic and that numbers in particular, are difficult for me to read. (Words have internal consistency, and context within sentences that let me straighten them out. So I was able to learn to read - not very fast, but serviceably well. Numbers are inherently arbitrary so I have no way to puzzle out a number as I can a word.)

I do understand mathematical logic, such as when to multiply and why, but I sure didn't learn that in school. Or much of anything else.

Math trivia is useful but not "basic." Kids should get substantial extra credit for memorizing it but should not be penalized if they can't.

While memorizing "math facts" is no impediment to mathematical literacy, it is hardly essential. The calculator can remember that 8 times 7 is 56, my job is to do something with those numbers in the real world. (I use a slide rule because it is difficult for me to read the numbers on a calculator. That's fine for any problem up to 3 sigs.)

My grade school experience took place during the Kennedy/Johnson administration. I've been told that "modern" teaching methods take LD into account but close review of current school materials leads me to believe that is self-congratulatory wishful thinking.

Learning disabilities are as individual as the people who have them. Some people who are LD are able to memorize things, others are not (but we can still learn and think.) It's a pair of shoes you'd rather not have to walk in.

I think memorization of poetry and prose is essential to learning a language. To read it is one thing, but to memorize something, to internalize the rhythms and the pulse of the language is something priceless.

In addition, as a classical singer and trumpet player, I've had to memorize tons of music. I still remember it all. (Including the marches I had to memorize in middle school.) When I'm reading music, I still have to think about what I'm reading, when it's memorized it's there without a thought. That lets me devote my full attention to playing it well.

As for the mental discipline aspect, I think that all this memorization has given me a great eye for detail. When I'm memorizing music, I make sure to catch every detail on the page, for if I miss something, it's incredibly difficult to re-memorize the piece. This ability has transferred over to my sight-reading ability, and my non-musical reading ability as well. I rarely have to re-read things any more, where I used to have to read something two, three, even four times to really get it.

Just some thoughts.

I never really felt like I had memorized the multiplication tables. It always took way too long to recall 7*6. But I was a math undergraduate and got a PhD in a mathy field.

Memorization was never a big part of my schooling, but more than most people around me, I have picked up and absorbed pieces of prose anyway. For example, I know most of the Lord's Prayer without effort (I'm not Christian and never was), and I can recite poem at the beginning of Lord of the Rings.

I did memorizing Hamlet's soliquies for extra credit and don't remember them so well now.

I was forced to memorize the map of counties in my home state--a completely useless activity. Memorizing the US states and capitols and the countries of the world and capitols was not useless.

While I certainly was required to memorize the standard fare during my earlier school years, my exposure to "hard core" memorization came during my freshman year in college at the Coast Guard Academy. As freshman we had to memorize and be prepared to provide, upon request, the sports scores of the day, the schedule of upcoming sporting events for the week, the menu for the week, the movies that were playing in town (including show times and ratings), as well as a myriad of other information. Four years later after graduating I found myself qualifying as a shipboard conning officer. It was critically important to be able to memorize and manage huge amounts of information - equipment status, surface contact information, comms frequencies in use, night orders, etc. At that point I recognized just how important it had been for me to develop my memory.

[i]Memorizing the US states and capitols and the countries of the world and capitols was not useless[/i]

unless, of course, you memorized the eastern european countries and capitals in 1988.

A couple of thoughts:

I went to a Catholic all-girl institution for highschool, where we had to memorize poems every other week. It was helpful for me, because I had to learn my own personal style for keeping information orderly and accurate. I also find that it is easier for me to memorize useful information long enough for me to find a place to write it down, if I happen to be without pen and paper.

Now that I am teaching, I find that those students who have not had to practice memorization oriented skills have a difficult time even with copying longer sentences from the board; most students have to look up after each word, frequently because they cannot retain more than a word or two at at time, whether a student has a learning difficulty or not. In addition, many of those students copy the information from the board incorrectly, with widespread misspellings, or frequently using entirely different words that alter the meaning of the sentence or sentences.

I know many of the teachers from grades 3-7 have begun to drill their students on this. This type of information does not have to be remembered "forever", certainly, but it does need to be remembered long enough to be written on the paper.

One might memorize quotations, of great importance, such as "untested morals are not known to exist", from Milton's Areopagitica, or "to have only the law of nature for his rule", from Locke.

Memorization is bad. Understanding how something works is the Golden Key to Problem Solving. When you understand what something is saying (i.e. The Declaration of Independence or The Raven) the "memorization" is easy and reproducible. Are thinking works by associating. Memorizing any unassocaited lists or facts is a waste of brain power and ultimately slows the learning process down. Devotion to to Understanding and figuring out How things go together is the key to reproducing the results of some known process and creating new ones. Memorizing will tell you the past at a terrific cost of brain power without giving you insight into the furture. Multiplication, for instance, is not something to be memorized. It's to be understood as a function from the building blocks of addition. MEMORIZING IS NOT PROBLEM SOLVING AND NOT EFFECTIVE LEARNING.

I learned the preamble to the constitution when I was 10 years old through the 'SchoolHouse Rock' sing-along song on saturday morning cartoons. I still remember the words.

When my daughter came home with a 4th grade homework assignment to memorize part of the declaration of independence, i looked for a 'schoolhouse rock' type song but couldn't find one --- so we wrote one ourselves. We realized it could help others so we produced a CD and sell the song on our website. We've sold over 500 copies to teachers and parents across the US.

Why in the world would a fourth grader be asked to memorize parts of the Declaration of Independence? I had to do a line by line reading with my 10th graders at a private east coast day school because they had such trouble understanding it. Along the way, I found myself doing a more thorough version of Locke than the textbook provided, plus a whole side bar on the concept of soveriegnty. I think about 1/2 the class really understands the D o I; they are the ones talking as we do the Constitution, which is a heck of a lot easier.

My fourth grader is memorizing the Declaration of Independence, in its' entirety, now. The American's Creed was our first adventure, and the Preamble is due 2 weeks after the Dec of Ind.

I'm looking for a suitable method of teaching it at home, ie, Schoolhouse Rock.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks it a bit much.