Thursday, June 13, 2013

The Memory Selection

During the last eight to ten years of my teaching career, I took it upon myself to include monthly memory selections in my English assigments--literary selections, usually short, that I required to be committed to memory for 25 points each.  My reasoning was that, if I did my job wisely, the selections I chose would stay with my students for the rest of their lives.  Thus, I was careful to select good material--things that I thought all good American citizens should know. 

The students never had less than a month to memorize the selection.  With each new assignment, I passed out copies, then put a copy on the overhead projector and went over it, line-by-line, discussing what it meant and why it was important.  As the due date grew closer, I would remind them:  Memory selections are due in a week.  Memory selections are due in two days.  One day.  Tomorrow.  Still, you'd think I was killing these kids!  Memorize something?  OMG!  Never mind that they knew the lyrics to rapid-lyric rap songs and could recite their friends' phone numbers by rote.  They thought that memorizing literature was teacher-administered torture!  I thought it was a grand exercise in using the brain.  No multiple choice answers here!  You either know it or you don't.  Period. 

The first memory selection of the year was always the school's Fight Song.  The athletes were required to know it by their coaches so they could lead the school with it at games, but the general spectators didn't always know the words.  I just figured that every good student should know his/her own school's song!  Other selections--which sometimes changed, but not usually--included:
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.
"The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America".
"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.
The opening of "The Declaration of Independence", down to "the consent of the governed".
"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus.  (The poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.)
"The Gettysburg Address" by Abraham Lincoln.

And here's how things shook out each month:
The "honors" class was almost 100% in memorization.  No problem there.
The "regular" classes had less than 50% of students cooperating with the assignment, but creating challenges in cheating.  (More about that in a minute.)
The class that included special ed. kids and afforded me a teacher's aide was challenging insofar as the spec. ed. kids wanted to succeed and tried, but asking them to write out the assignment was out of the question.  I cut the memorization down by about half for them, and on the due date, sent them out of the room with the aide for them to recite it to her, one by one.  That generally worked!

When I first started the memory thing, it was my intention that everyone write it out.  I soon noted (see the special ed class above) that it wouldn't always work.  Thus, I gave every class the opportunity to either recite or write.  I had to be a little careful because if my attention was given to those reciting, I couldn't be watching for those who were cheating.  In time, that worked itself out.  I had a system.  "Clear off your desks of everything but a piece of paper and your pencil, and make sure your copy of the selection is not in sight."  I walked up and down the aisles while the kids were writing.  (Recitations came after the writing was turned in.)  And I was lenient.  If a kid was writing but just seemed stuck, I would offer the next word or two to jog the memory.  Oh, yeah!...and they would continue writing.  I also gave partial credit.  I didn't count off for spelling or punctuation, and lines didn't have to be exact, as long as the point was clear.  The only people who received no credit were those who made no effort at all.  If they got part of the assignment, they got an equal part of the credit. Some points were better than no points at all. 

But then, there was the hard core cheating.  At first, it was just copies of the selections just below the desk or on the student's lap.  Busted most of those.  Then found a student who had written the selection on the desktop in pencil (that could be rubbed off with a finger).  His response?  "Huh!  How did that get there??"  Then I noticed that less-than-good students were turning in perfect papers--spelling, punctuation, and all.  When I told them to clear off their desks except for a piece of paper, they were hiding a perfectly written copy under a blank piece of paper, then turning in the perfect copy after I was done going down the aisles.  I thwarted that by supplying unlined white copy paper for them to do the memory selection on.  They caught onto that pretty fast!  It wasn't hard for them to come up with unlined copy paper to substitute for what I had given them.

This is where I needed to get creative.  I realized that I still had to provide the paper, but it needed to be a different color.  I went to the office to beg the secretary for a ream of her precious colored copy paper.  Understand that the secretary was proprietary about her stash (and rightly so), but when she found out that I was trying to prevent kids from cheating, she gladly gave me what she didn't think she needed.  I almost heard a collective groan from the kids when I handed out blue paper for the memory selection that first day.  Each month after that, there was a different color--and no one could guess what color it would be!

The bottom line for me, however, came when someone suspicious managed to skirt all of my efforts and still turn in a perfect copy.  If I caught it that day, I would take the student's paper and slap a blank one in front of him/her and say, "Write it again."  Then I would stand there to see what happened.  One-hundred-percent of those ended with "You caught me.  I don't know it."  It was a joke to them.   Can't blame a kid for trying, right?

Actually, it was a joke to me, too.  Not knowing a memory selection isn't exactly being a failure at life.  In all my years of assigning memory selections, I only had one parent complain.  If a kid's grades were generally good, but he/she blew off the selection, it would hurt his/her grade just a little.  But if a kid's grades weren't great, a 25-point zero made a big difference.  This particular parent complained that he (the parent) didn't know about the assignment and so couldn't direct his kid to study it.  My comment was that he (the 8th grade student) had known about the assignment for at least month, including my constant reminders.  By way of concession, I gave the student a chance to recite the selection to me days after it was due, for partial credit.  He still didn't know it.  Oh well!

My biggest reward for this has come on Facebook from former (usually honors) students who have seen/heard references to the things I made them memorize... and recognized them.  I may not have been the best English teacher in the world, but I do not regret for a second asking my students to learn the basics of our American institutions by way of literature.

And so, for now..."the woods are lovely, dark, and deep..but I have promises to keep...and miles to go before I sleep.  And miles to go before I sleep".  :)   

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