Of all of the methods which have been used to teach, memorization, and even more specifically ROTE memorization has attained the status of idea non grata… I’ve always wondered why… This bugaboo to the ideals of progressive educational methods has quite a few real advantages to it.
First, let’s look at some of the reasons for memorization and why they may be of value in the classroom. I have seen many efforts over the years to inculcate modern math into curricula… This is a method of teaching where, instead of dealing with Rote memorization and mechanical repetition, teachers present concepts for the student to intellectually grasp. Thus we can teach algebra to 2nd and 3rd graders… To what end this actually works has always been a curiosity to me.
There is a practical history of Rote memorization working (how did you learn the ABC’s?), and there is also a history of the value in having a store of basic information at one’s grasp…with regard to more complex ideas…
The Power of Memorization
http://blog.calvertschool.org/tips/the-power-of-memorization
Memory is a funny thing – the younger you are, the more capacity you seem have to memorize material. This is not to say that adults cannot memorize, but Lord knows I cannot remember what I ate for breakfast – but I can remember many of the things I memorized at the ages 6-10 – why is that?
In my own very nonscientific observations, memorization increases the capacity for focus. The “memorizers” -not all of them were- now seem as high school and college students to have more capacity to stay focused on tasks related to their education. It seems easier for them to “own.”
I can still recall the tenets of the Gettysburg address I was “forced” to memorize in 4th grade – back in the dark ages when we still celebrated Lincoln’s birthday (instead of President’s Day). My high school age daughter is now working on memorizing Lincoln’s words and having a tough time of it. Needless to say, SHE is the one who always gave me push back when it was time to memorize something. Is there a correlation? I think so.
The premise which old school educators had was that (1) younger students have the capacity to easily memorize lots of things, and (2) having these things in one’s mental storehouse allows the deeper significance of what they mean to be covered much more easily later on in life. I have seen far too many secondary math classes hamstringing students with far too much use of calculators, and even to the degree that I have been in discussions with fellow teachers (math teachers) who considered that memorizing such time honored tools as the multiplication tables to be worthless… Of course these were the same teachers who didn’t really know why math was important for these students to learn…other than the fact that they might become… carpenters or engineers… I’ve already covered some of what I think are incredibly important reasons in a previous post (see: why should I study math?).
Secondly, there are plenty of valid reasons that we can reap the benefits of this skill…
I had a discussion with my brother a decade or two ago…about the advantages in keeping as many things as possible at easy access on one’s ‘mental desktop’. This meant for him (a Physics grad student at the time) to try to keep a lot of math identities, shortcuts, and methods at one’s immediate access via memorization if only because it had incredible value. It saved time, and even more importantly, it allowed him to see and understand things far more quickly.
The classic value in memorization can be seen in the graduates of old school (literally old school) methods, where they had memorized any number of poems or pieces of classic literature. Even now, if you know someone who can recite or quote passages from Shakespeare, you may feel reflexively indignant about this sort of ‘high brow snobbery’…but there is also much in this which we probably admire too…
In Defense of Memorization
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_defense_memorization.html
The standard of literacy in the 1927 Course of Study in Literature for Elementary Schools is astonishingly high. Poems “for reading and memorization” by first-graders include those of Robert Louis Stevenson (“Rain” and “The Land of Nod”), A. A. Milne (“Hoppity”), Christina Rossetti (“Four Pets”), and Charles Kingsley (“The Lost Doll”). Second-graders grappled with poems by Tennyson (“The Bee and the Flower”), Sara Coleridge (“The Garden Year”), and Lewis Carroll (“The Melancholy Pig”). In third grade came Blake’s “The Shepherd” and Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” while fourth grade brought Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Kipling. In the grades that followed, students read and recited poems by Arnold, Browning, Burns, Cowper, Emerson, Keats, Macaulay, Poe, Scott, Shakespeare, Southey, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Eighth-graders tackled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.
Observers were impressed by how quickly the kids mastered the material. A visitor to a first-grade classroom in New York in 1912 remarked on how quickly pupils absorbed the verses their teacher had sung to them. “At the end of twenty-five or thirty minutes,” the visitor said, “a large majority of the class seemed to know most of the words—a remarkable fact, since there were more than fifty children present and this was only the second week of school.” This was at a time when more than 200,000 immigrants were settling in New York each year, and teachers were staggering under the burden of large enrollments.
Finally, there is the value in developing or inculcating some personal skills, notably discipline… it takes a lot of focus in the present to manage to memorize something, this is a valuable skill unto itself.
On the Value of Rote Memorization
http://www.ebtx.com/math/rotemem.htm
The value lies in concentration. While writing the same thing fails, of itself, to integrate data, it does cause one’s mind to focus on the particular matter for one cannot write with a pen or pencil and daydream at the same time. Each entry in the task is slightly different than the former and a mistake requires a rewrite … and … the work was actually checked for authenticity (spot checked). Though I tried to automate the process, I was unable to write and watch TV at the same time.
What I was able to do is notice from time to time, regularities, and interesting relationships between numbers, primes, divisors, shortcuts, etc. In other words, the material began to integrate because of the demand to focus on the subject.
Another effect of rote memorization is the freeing up of mental CPU cycles to do other tasks. If I know some equations, say the trigonometric functions, from rote memory, I needn’t spend time thinking about that aspect of a given mathematical problem. If the context is known from memory, one can focus on the relevant particulars at hand.
For me, I came about to this point of view a long time ago, when I was in a language school. After a couple weeks, I was presented with having to memorize 20 new words every day, to be able to translate from English, or to English, and to be able to conjugate verbs and use all of the tenses… At first I spend every night with a tape recorder (usually long after midnight), trying to gain some mastery over these daily tests.
After a couple months I started to realize that I was doing better and better in class, and that I was spending less time studying… It seems that under some duress I have slowly developed some of the skills needed to efficiently memorize information, to get this information into long term memory and to develop schemes to put it all in context.
I found that there was no other way to learn some of these subjects…
