I am walking through an alternate reality. And I am so struck, I have to sit and post about it.
I am in the Humanities building. There is a big event in class today. I know this because there are scores of undergrads, huddled in groups outside a series of classrooms. Two of them are texting and one of them is sleeping. But about 40 of them (50?) are reciting poems, Shakespeare, Yertle the Turtle. It seems to be self-written, based on a widely-recognized work. They have movements to go with their recitations. They are practicing. They are engaged.
Who is the professor who commands students to make total asses of themselves so successfully? I have no doubt that this is a teaching genius. I am filled with envy. Forget essays. Screw tests. I need them to perform.
Perhaps it appeals to their ego, or their sense of fun. Maybe the fear of messing up in front of an audience prevents them from phoning it in, as they do so often for my assignments. There is a message to be learned in each of their projects. And instead of killing off grandma, skipping class, "losing" their books, my god, MY GOD!! they are learning!!!!
In-class recitation.
I have students in upper-level math courses give presentations at the end of the semester. Even the ones who barely do the homework really engage the material that I assign for them to present to the rest of the class. It's really cool.
ReplyDeleteI should add that it takes a lot of extra effort on my part (they must give practice presentations to me in office hours so that I can show them how to teach), but it is totally worth it. The vast majority learn something.
ReplyDeleteI am walking through an alternate reality.... I am in the Humanities building.
ReplyDelete'Nuff said.
honest_prof - if they're memorizing poetry, yes, learning is going on.
ReplyDeleteWhy is memorizing poetry learning? I'm asking for real and non-snarkily, btw. I'm not an English prof, obviously, and am just curious.
ReplyDeleteI believe that we are so far away from actual engagement that we are comparing learning poetry with buying a book and throwing it in the trash.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, memorizing a piece you wrote is more learning than buying a book and chucking it out the window.
And to be clear, they seemed to be original pieces -- not Shakespeare exactly, but Shakespeare-themed re-imagined recitations. Yertle the Turtle and politics. They seemed to be engaged.
I once taught a poetry class in which I made students learn an poem by heart, and one of them said he used the ability to recite a poem to get sex from his girlfriend. IF THAT IS NOT LEARNING, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS.
ReplyDeleteTrivia: It was "How do I love thee, let me count the ways". Because I know you were wondering.
I often use poetry reading in class, sometimes memorized, sometimes not. Part of my job is to introduce students to great literature, great art, to help them learn to appreciate all of the stuff that makes life interesting.
ReplyDeleteBy learning a poem inside and out, they often see how the thing was built.
I know we all have our disciplines, but I occasionally get quite irked when the humanities get shit on...again. And I can tell that's something on the verge of happening here.
Yep, me too, DK. Why memorize the table of elements or the multiplication tables?
ReplyDeleteMemorizing poetry teaches the relationship between content and sound/meter/poetic form, and performing it teaches elocution and what used to be called poise. It's one among many, many ways to get students to engage viscerally with language. It transmits culture. It forces close attention to a single activity. Added to which having memorized a poem comes in handy when you need to get laid or make a wedding toast.
To those who haven't ever memorized a poem.
ReplyDeleteTry it. You'll thank me. It's amazingly fun, and you'll discover facets of the poem you'd've missed just from reading it. Pick one you enjoy, and take a few minutes a day to memorize a couple more lines each time. Then recite it to a friend or a lover.
And yes, it is a from of learning. I would hope it is not the only one used by that proffie, but it is a valuable one.
honest_prof, this kind of memorization seems to be college-level learning to me. And besides, all you saw (correct me if I'm wrong) was students practicing reciting a poem they'd memorized. You don't know (again, correct me if I'm wrong) for what purpose.
ReplyDeleteSome of my students memorize poetry, speeches from Shakespeare, that sort of thing. It's not about rote memorization and parroting it back robotically. It's a way to get them to deeply engage with a text, to see how it's constructed, what kind of rhetorical strategies are used. This allows them to engage with speech in their daily lives - figuring out what's happening in a political speech, for example. That's critical, and it's useful. In my opinion.
Nobody's attacking the humanities here, so let's all be cool. I merely asked a question about pedagogical technique as someone from outside the field. I would be happy to answer the same question about any activity that a colleague observed in my class. Paying attention to what my talented colleagues are doing makes me a better teacher. I am a shameless thief of lesson ideas.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate F&T's comment about learning sound and meter through memorizing and performing a poem; that seems to make perfect sense.
I think what honest_prof is saying is that memorization itself is not necessarily "deeply engaging" with a text. And you don't need memorization to identify rhetorical styles or layers of meaning. But clearly from what others have said, there *is* value in memorization for some purposes.
Honest Prof, you are making the point I am using as my place of departure.
ReplyDeleteCollege students eat it. It's all I can do to convince them it will be worth while to open their books. They sleep through class, they turn in papers late. They get so many Cs that my Chair is upset. This whole blog is about our battles with them.
And that is precisely what made these enthusiastic, apparently-prepared students so twilight-zonish.
This past week I attended presentations given by seniors showing off their senior projects, which ranged from oral histories of war vets, to original artwork, to starting a business to sell African art to help an east African village. It was nice to see students engaged and justifiably proud of their work!
ReplyDeleteI haven't memorized and recited a poem since fifth grade ("Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. . ."), but I've done what is called "Biblical Storytelling" -- essentially reciting from (a chosen translation of) the Bible, with minor changes if any to make the story more "tellable," and it is, indeed, a way to engage deeply with a text. One comes to understand the linguistic structure of the passage -- echoes, repetitions, themes, etc. -- as well as the narrative arc, in a way that one doesn't while just reading. Of course, writing a solid close reading of a passage accomplishes much of the same purpose, but it's hard to get students to do a solid close reading, and having them read out loud in class (without memorizing) is often a preparatory a step in that direction.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that preparing to recite a poem in public is more like memorizing the Krebs cycle, or the process of photosynthesis, and being able to explain what happens if something unexpected happens at any point in the process, or memorizing the periodic table *and* being able to explain how it's arranged and why (all of which I could once do), than it is like memorizing some random list of facts. The structure helps one remember the words/content, and vice versa, and, in the process, you come to understand both better.
And yes, for all that we writing proffies try to give students a sense of audience in our written assignments, it's clear that a real audience of their peers for an oral presentation often brings out a level of performance that we don't see in their written work. For all that I love the written word, this makes a certain amount of sense; human beings subsisted on oral culture alone for much of history, and with the advent of technologies that allow oral communication to be transmitted easily over time and space, we may be moving back in that direction.
I had the same reaction as Wisconsin Will. The Kindle comment was deliberately obtuse and designed to cause trouble, and I also thought, aha. This is what h_p was doing before, and he hasn't changed after all.
ReplyDeleteh_p, I had made myself a promise never to respond directly to one of your comments again. I am breaking it now to tell you this: you know damn well what you were doing. It's called "trolling". Quit it.