How's your memory (work)?

One of the tenets of classical education is memory work: memorization and recitation.  In the grammar stage (up to 5th grade), you are encouraged to explore, discover, and memorize.  Those who support classical education will tell you that the child doesn't even need to fully understand what they are memorizing; that comes later on as children mature and become analytical.  They claim the more facts and poems that you can expose a child to and have them memorize, the more mental pegs form in a child's brain to "hang" information on when they hear it again later.

It sounded like a challenging lofty goal, especially when I thought back to my days of memorization and recitation in school.  When I thought of doing memory work with Lily, the phrase "drill and kill" kept popping up in my head.  I remembered days of stomping to linking verbs, chanting preposition lists, reciting multiplication facts, and repeating definitions over and over again.  Honestly, it sounded awful.  And boring.  As a new homeschooler, I half-heartedly jumped in and decided I was willing to give memory work a try, but I was also just as willing to throw it out the window the minute I felt it no longer worked for us.  To tell the truth, there was a part of me that was hoping it wouldn't work so I could confidently throw it out and tell myself that I knew better.

What a difference perspective and attitude make.  I came into this from an adult's perspective.  Memory work was nothing more than a chore to be completed...an assignment to be finished quickly so that we could move on to something more fun.  As it turned out, Lily had never read the memo that memory work was drudgery and something to dread.  She loved memorizing things.  And she was good at it.  She devoured every poem and list that I could find and eagerly asked for more.  She randomly rattled off her new knowledge to anyone who would listen, each time as obviously proud of herself for remembering it as the time before.  Her confidence grew as she committed longer and longer passages to memory.  Lily viewed it with the same enthusiasm, excitement, and eagerness as she did everything else.

We've continued with memory work, although some years have been better than others.  Last year was one of those years I wish we'd done better.  I thought I found the perfect program that would give us weekly memory work for history, science, Latin, geography, math, and English.  It was perfect for us in the beginning.  Both Lily and Noah quickly learned the definition of a preposition and could list off every preposition (among other things).  I'd often hear them racing one another to see who could say them faster.  A few months later, we encountered prepositions in grammar.  They already had those mental pegs from their memory work so it was a piece of cake for them.

As the year progressed, winter came and we got sick.While we were sick, memory work was the last thing on my list.  Then the February blues hit.  I tried to go back and pick it up as spring came, but now I felt pressure to try to catch up to where we should have been.  The kids were discouraged.  I was discouraged.  Our attitude and perspective had changed...and it was set aside to collect dust.

After talking with Lily, we are ready to dive back in to memory work this year with the excitement and enthusiasm that we lost.  I've revamped our memory work so that it fits us and I'm using it as a starting point.  Week numbers are marked out; who cares if it takes us more (or less!) time than the book thinks it should.  Memory work does not have a finish line.  It is not a means to an end.  It's a process and just one more tool in our toolbox.

Earlier this summer, I read an article about the importance of memory work.  The author pointed out that our children are memorizing things every moment of every day.  Silly jokes they hear from their friends.  Commercial jingles on the television.  The newest Lady Gaga song from the radio.  Pop culture, mass media, and their peers will fill a child's mind if given the chance.  There certainly is a spot for those so a child grows to understand their own culture, but we are doing them a disservice if we don't give them a chance to fill their mind with more than that.  We can make the choice to fill their minds with names and places and facts, which creates mental pegs upon which new information can later be added.  And we can fill their minds with poetry, which increases vocabulary, helps teach complex language patterns, fills the mind with beautiful language.

Given those options, the choice seems simple.