Mrs. Ritter

Mrs. Ritter was my eighth grade English teacher who forced us all to memorize poetry. But she was the last teacher to ask me to memorize anything. That was 1967. I wish we had learned more. Think what it would be like to have one's mind full of Shakespear and Herbert, Keats and Wordsworth and Tennyson. But that advantage was taken away from several generations of schoolchildren by the mavens of ed schools in the 60s and 70s. The City Journal has a great deal to say on this in an article by Michael Knox Beran "In Defense of Memorization." After googling Beran, I see that Faraz Rabbani (in Amman, Jordan) of Seeker's Digest, a fellow blogger, has already linked to City Journal back in July. And a nice looking blog, it is, too.

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”