25 Manners Every Kid Should Know By Age Nine
Helping your child master these simple rules of etiquette will get him noticed -- for all the right reasons. By David Lowry, Ph.D.Sometimes kids just don't realize it's impolite to interrupt, pick their nose, or loudly observe that the lady walking in front of them has a large behind. And in the hustle and bustle of daily life, busy moms and dads don't always have the time to focus on etiquette. But if you reinforce these 25 must-do manners, you'll raise a polite, kind, well-liked child.
Manner #1
When asking for something, say "Please."
Manner #2
When receiving something, say "Thank you."
Manner #3
Do not interrupt people are speaking with each other unless there is an emergency. They will notice you and respond when they are finished talking.
Manner #4
If you do need to get somebody's attention right away, the phrase "excuse me" is the most polite way for you to enter the conversation.
Manner #5
When you have any doubt about doing something, ask permission first. It can save you from many hours of grief later.
Manner #6
The world is not interested in what you dislike. Keep negative opinions to yourself, or between you and your friends, and out of earshot of adults.
Manner #7
Do not comment on other people's physical characteristics unless, of course, it's to compliment them, which is always welcome.
Manner #8
When people ask you how you are, tell them and then ask them how they are.
Manner #9
When you have spent time at your friend's house, remember to thank his or her parents for having you over and for the good time you had.
Manner #10
Knock on closed doors -- and wait to see if there's a response -- before entering.
Manner #11
When you make a phone call, introduce yourself first and then ask if you can speak with the person you are calling.
Manner #12
Be appreciative and say "thank you" for any gift you receive. In the age of e-mail, a handwritten thank-you note can have a powerful effect.
Manner #13
Never use foul language in front of adults. Grown-ups already know all those words, and they find them boring and unpleasant.
Manner #14
Don't call people mean names.
Manner #15
Do not make fun of anyone for any reason. Teasing shows others you are weak, and ganging up on someone else is cruel.
Manner #16
Even if a play or an assembly is boring, sit through it quietly and pretend that you are interested. The performers and presenters are doing their best.
Manner #17
If you bump into somebody, immediately say "Excuse me."
Manner #18
Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and don't pick your nose in public.
Manner #19
As you walk through a door, look to see if you can hold it open for someone else.
Manner #20
If you come across a parent, a teacher, or a neighbor working on something, ask if you can help. If they say "yes," do so -- you may learn something new.
Manner #21
When an adult asks you for a favor, do it without grumbling and with a smile.
Manner #22
When someone helps you, say "thank you." That person will likely want to help you again. This is especially true with teachers!
Manner #23
Use eating utensils properly. If you are unsure how to do so, ask your parents to teach you or watch what adults do.
Manner #24
Keep a napkin on your lap; use it to wipe your mouth when necessary.
Manner #25
Don't reach for things at the table; ask to have them passed.
Originally published in the March 2011 issue of Parents magazine.
How knowing Latin helped one reporter to get the scoop of the century
How knowing Latin helped one reporter to get the scoop of the century
Memoria Press
Saving tWestern Civilization One Student at a Time
http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/1383
"Qui res mundi vellet scire linguam Latinam cognosciat."
If you don't know what that means, then join all the reporters who missed one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the 21st century. When Pope Benedict XVI recently abdicated the papacy, he did it in a speech that was supposed to be about the canonization of three saints. But all of a sudden, he began almost whispering in Latin. Giovanna Chirri, the Vatican reporter for ANSA, the leading news wire service in Italy, was covering the regularly scheduled speech.
She immediately realized what the Pope was saying. She knew Latin.
She quickly called Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi to confirm what she thought she had heard: that Benedict was going to do something that no pope had done for 717 years: voluntarily step down from his office. But Lombardi could not be reached. Chirri then reported to her editor at the ANSA News agency that the Pope had just announced his abdication. But the editor got cold feet, and a heated argument ensued between the reporter and her editor, the editor doubting her story, and Chirri insisting that her Latin was good enough to understand what the Pope had said. At 11:46 a.m. GMT, ANSA sent out the alert to a surprised world. Chirri had scooped the rest of the press corp because she knew Latin. Oh, and that Latin sentence above? It means, "He who wants to know what's happening in the world should know Latin."
Memoria Press
Saving tWestern Civilization One Student at a Time
http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/1383
"Qui res mundi vellet scire linguam Latinam cognosciat."
If you don't know what that means, then join all the reporters who missed one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the 21st century. When Pope Benedict XVI recently abdicated the papacy, he did it in a speech that was supposed to be about the canonization of three saints. But all of a sudden, he began almost whispering in Latin. Giovanna Chirri, the Vatican reporter for ANSA, the leading news wire service in Italy, was covering the regularly scheduled speech.
She immediately realized what the Pope was saying. She knew Latin.
She quickly called Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi to confirm what she thought she had heard: that Benedict was going to do something that no pope had done for 717 years: voluntarily step down from his office. But Lombardi could not be reached. Chirri then reported to her editor at the ANSA News agency that the Pope had just announced his abdication. But the editor got cold feet, and a heated argument ensued between the reporter and her editor, the editor doubting her story, and Chirri insisting that her Latin was good enough to understand what the Pope had said. At 11:46 a.m. GMT, ANSA sent out the alert to a surprised world. Chirri had scooped the rest of the press corp because she knew Latin. Oh, and that Latin sentence above? It means, "He who wants to know what's happening in the world should know Latin."
Keep Kids from Cheating in School
By Melissa Balmain, Parenting.com
Technology, busy schedules and distractions all make it increasingly easier for kids to cheat.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Busy after-school schedules and technology make cheating attractive to kids
Defining what cheating actually is can help kids to understand what they're doing wrong
Instead of pressuring children to do well, encourage them to do their best
(Parenting.com) -- You're a typical fourth-grader. You've got soccer three afternoons this week, two birthday parties, piano, chess club, recycling club, and making-stuff-from-duct- tape club. On top of all that, you're supposed to write a big report about tornadoes -- and you know Mom and Dad will freak if you bring home a bad grade. Would you be tempted to save time with a little cutting and pasting from the web?
If you're like plenty of students, you would. It's a perfect storm out there for cheating: jam-packed after-school schedules, high expectations from parents and teachers, and technology just waiting to help kids make an end run around the rules. Studies show that by the time they graduate from high school, 80 to 85 percent of kids have cheated at least once, says Eric M. Anderman, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at Ohio State University in Columbus.
From kindergarten through about second grade, cheating remains old-school, teachers say: copying a classmate's homework, peeking over someone's shoulder during a spelling test. By third grade, kids might add Internet plagiarism to their repertoires. Middleschoolers -- and, to a greater extent, high-schoolers -- have invented sneaky tricks their parents never dreamed of. Kids might text each other answers during an exam, share electronic files, or even snap secret cell-phone pictures of a test for pals who haven't taken it yet.
The best way to keep your child from joining in? Start now -- in the elementary years before cheating becomes truly widespread. "You want to get good behavioral habits established while moral reasoning is developing and deepening," says Thomas Lickona, Ph.D., author of "Raising Good Children and Character Matters -- How to Help Our Children Develop Good Judgment, Integrity, and Other Essential Virtues." "There's research to suggest that even young children are more sophisticated and morally observant than we might give them credit for." In other words: It's the perfect time to turn CHEAT into TEACH.
Help Them Get It
Younger children often don't understand why cheating makes grown-ups upset. "It's not devious when they cheat," says Carrie Saffady, who has taught first and second grades in Brooklyn, NY. "It's almost like they don't know that they shouldn't do it." Older kids realize cheating is wrong but may not think that some practices -- copying classmates' homework, for instance -- "count" as cheating.. Either way, you need to make it clear to your kid that passing off someone else's words or ideas as his own is never acceptable.
"Use all the reasons you can think of," Lickona says -- and tell them to your child often. For instance, you might say, Everyone knows that cheating is synonymous with stealing and lying, but do you realize how unfair it is to those who don't do it, or how it will affect your relationships with friends, teachers, parents? Ask your child how she'd feel if she'd worked really hard on a paper and another kid got the same grade by cheating. Above all, Lickona advises, tell your child that cheating breaches and damages trust -- his teacher's, his classmates', and yours. "The most powerful deterrent for kids is feeling that they've violated a relationship," he says.
Explain, too, that a cheater also hurts himself. When you cheat, you don't learn. Since lessons build on each other, cheating now means you won't understand later material, either. And, of course, if you're caught, you might receive a zero on paper, say, or have to answer to the principal.
Lay Off, Mom
The main reason kids cheat as they get older, experts say, is pressure to get top marks. This pressure comes from both parents ("You won't get into a good high school or college if you get C's!") and teachers ("We have a very important test coming up for our school!").
"I've had kids who get money or some other reward from their parents for having really good grades," says Teresa Burke, a third-grade teacher in Blacksburg, Virginia, and a mom of two. Such emphasis can give students the idea that getting an A -- rather than earning one -- is what matters. So why not cheat?
"There's such a natural tendency for parents to say, 'Let me see your work' and look at the grade," Anderman says. "My number one advice for them is, instead of saying 'How did you do on the spelling test?' ask 'What did you learn?' Or 'What new really cool math thing did you do in class this week?" If your child does poorly on an assignment, stress your concern about whether she's learning what she needs to know -- not whether she got a C-minus. Assure her that everyone makes mistakes and that you just expect her to try her hardest. To further show kids that knowledge is the important thing, relate school lessons to the real world as much as you can, educators suggest. When you see a "25% Off" sign at a clothing store, for instance, ask your child, "How many dollars could we save on this shirt?"
Be a follower...
...of the rules, that is. If you want your kids to believe that cheating is wrong, think twice before you park in that handicapped space without a permit or order from the 10-and-under menu for your 11-year-old. And be sure to point out your honest behavior to them and connect it to being honest at school ("I could save time by parking in that space, but it wouldn't be fair to people who really need it -- just like it wouldn't be fair to your classmates if you saved time by copying their homework"). "We send our children messages by our own behaviors, and children take in a lot more than we even realize, consciously and unconsciously," says Gary Niels, a Pittsburgh headmaster who has studied cheating while on a fellowship at Columbia University's Teacher's College.
Kids may be influenced by other people's dishonesty, too -- from classmates to people in the news -- so be on the lookout for "teachable moments" outside your family. "Ask your child, 'Who wants to end up like Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire?'" says Lickona, recalling both ballplayers' scandals over steroid use. "'These guys were brought to shame and have no reason to hold their heads up anymore. Bernie Madoff not only hurt thousands of people [through his Ponzi scheme] but brought great disgrace to his family.'"
Keep it honest
Research suggests that school honor codes -- which discourage cheating and other poor behaviors -- work best when students have a hand in creating and enforcing them. By the same token, Lickona says, letting your kids help write and maintain a family honor code could be a great way to curb cheating. (Sample language: "In our family, we don't lie, cheat, or steal; we take responsibility for our actions; we do our best in everything.") Another helpful tool is Lickona's "Ethics-in-Action Quiz", which gives kids questions to mull over when they're deciding whether something they want to do is unethical. Among the questions: "Would I want someone to do this to me?" "Does this go against what my conscience tells me is right?" "Would I want this made public through Facebook, YouTube, texting, etc., and seen by my teachers, parents, employers, or future spouse?"
If your child admits to cheating or is caught doing so, let her know how disappointed you are -- but also encourage her to tell you why she resorted to it so you can work together to find a better way. Does your child feel strapped for time because of after-school activities? Insist she drop one or two -- at least for now. Is she having trouble understanding material in class? Perhaps you can explain it or find a teacher or tutor who can. Is she feeling pressured by other kids to let them copy her work? Explain that this would be like helping them steal something -- and coach her in ways to respond. The bottom line when it comes to curbing cheating, Anderman says, is never to leave kids feeling helpless. "Make them feel you're their partner."
When Parents Cheat
Sure, it's important to sit down with your kids over their homework and get them excited about learning. But teachers can always tell if you go over the line. Among the practices that drive them crazy:
--Masterminding your kids' projects
--Completing their homework, instead of helping them understand it
--Fudging their reading logs
--Typing their homework for them (unless they have physical disabilities)
--Dictating answers to them
By Melissa Balmain, Parenting.com
Technology, busy schedules and distractions all make it increasingly easier for kids to cheat.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Busy after-school schedules and technology make cheating attractive to kids
Defining what cheating actually is can help kids to understand what they're doing wrong
Instead of pressuring children to do well, encourage them to do their best
(Parenting.com) -- You're a typical fourth-grader. You've got soccer three afternoons this week, two birthday parties, piano, chess club, recycling club, and making-stuff-from-duct- tape club. On top of all that, you're supposed to write a big report about tornadoes -- and you know Mom and Dad will freak if you bring home a bad grade. Would you be tempted to save time with a little cutting and pasting from the web?
If you're like plenty of students, you would. It's a perfect storm out there for cheating: jam-packed after-school schedules, high expectations from parents and teachers, and technology just waiting to help kids make an end run around the rules. Studies show that by the time they graduate from high school, 80 to 85 percent of kids have cheated at least once, says Eric M. Anderman, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at Ohio State University in Columbus.
From kindergarten through about second grade, cheating remains old-school, teachers say: copying a classmate's homework, peeking over someone's shoulder during a spelling test. By third grade, kids might add Internet plagiarism to their repertoires. Middleschoolers -- and, to a greater extent, high-schoolers -- have invented sneaky tricks their parents never dreamed of. Kids might text each other answers during an exam, share electronic files, or even snap secret cell-phone pictures of a test for pals who haven't taken it yet.
The best way to keep your child from joining in? Start now -- in the elementary years before cheating becomes truly widespread. "You want to get good behavioral habits established while moral reasoning is developing and deepening," says Thomas Lickona, Ph.D., author of "Raising Good Children and Character Matters -- How to Help Our Children Develop Good Judgment, Integrity, and Other Essential Virtues." "There's research to suggest that even young children are more sophisticated and morally observant than we might give them credit for." In other words: It's the perfect time to turn CHEAT into TEACH.
Help Them Get It
Younger children often don't understand why cheating makes grown-ups upset. "It's not devious when they cheat," says Carrie Saffady, who has taught first and second grades in Brooklyn, NY. "It's almost like they don't know that they shouldn't do it." Older kids realize cheating is wrong but may not think that some practices -- copying classmates' homework, for instance -- "count" as cheating.. Either way, you need to make it clear to your kid that passing off someone else's words or ideas as his own is never acceptable.
"Use all the reasons you can think of," Lickona says -- and tell them to your child often. For instance, you might say, Everyone knows that cheating is synonymous with stealing and lying, but do you realize how unfair it is to those who don't do it, or how it will affect your relationships with friends, teachers, parents? Ask your child how she'd feel if she'd worked really hard on a paper and another kid got the same grade by cheating. Above all, Lickona advises, tell your child that cheating breaches and damages trust -- his teacher's, his classmates', and yours. "The most powerful deterrent for kids is feeling that they've violated a relationship," he says.
Explain, too, that a cheater also hurts himself. When you cheat, you don't learn. Since lessons build on each other, cheating now means you won't understand later material, either. And, of course, if you're caught, you might receive a zero on paper, say, or have to answer to the principal.
Lay Off, Mom
The main reason kids cheat as they get older, experts say, is pressure to get top marks. This pressure comes from both parents ("You won't get into a good high school or college if you get C's!") and teachers ("We have a very important test coming up for our school!").
"I've had kids who get money or some other reward from their parents for having really good grades," says Teresa Burke, a third-grade teacher in Blacksburg, Virginia, and a mom of two. Such emphasis can give students the idea that getting an A -- rather than earning one -- is what matters. So why not cheat?
"There's such a natural tendency for parents to say, 'Let me see your work' and look at the grade," Anderman says. "My number one advice for them is, instead of saying 'How did you do on the spelling test?' ask 'What did you learn?' Or 'What new really cool math thing did you do in class this week?" If your child does poorly on an assignment, stress your concern about whether she's learning what she needs to know -- not whether she got a C-minus. Assure her that everyone makes mistakes and that you just expect her to try her hardest. To further show kids that knowledge is the important thing, relate school lessons to the real world as much as you can, educators suggest. When you see a "25% Off" sign at a clothing store, for instance, ask your child, "How many dollars could we save on this shirt?"
Be a follower...
...of the rules, that is. If you want your kids to believe that cheating is wrong, think twice before you park in that handicapped space without a permit or order from the 10-and-under menu for your 11-year-old. And be sure to point out your honest behavior to them and connect it to being honest at school ("I could save time by parking in that space, but it wouldn't be fair to people who really need it -- just like it wouldn't be fair to your classmates if you saved time by copying their homework"). "We send our children messages by our own behaviors, and children take in a lot more than we even realize, consciously and unconsciously," says Gary Niels, a Pittsburgh headmaster who has studied cheating while on a fellowship at Columbia University's Teacher's College.
Kids may be influenced by other people's dishonesty, too -- from classmates to people in the news -- so be on the lookout for "teachable moments" outside your family. "Ask your child, 'Who wants to end up like Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire?'" says Lickona, recalling both ballplayers' scandals over steroid use. "'These guys were brought to shame and have no reason to hold their heads up anymore. Bernie Madoff not only hurt thousands of people [through his Ponzi scheme] but brought great disgrace to his family.'"
Keep it honest
Research suggests that school honor codes -- which discourage cheating and other poor behaviors -- work best when students have a hand in creating and enforcing them. By the same token, Lickona says, letting your kids help write and maintain a family honor code could be a great way to curb cheating. (Sample language: "In our family, we don't lie, cheat, or steal; we take responsibility for our actions; we do our best in everything.") Another helpful tool is Lickona's "Ethics-in-Action Quiz", which gives kids questions to mull over when they're deciding whether something they want to do is unethical. Among the questions: "Would I want someone to do this to me?" "Does this go against what my conscience tells me is right?" "Would I want this made public through Facebook, YouTube, texting, etc., and seen by my teachers, parents, employers, or future spouse?"
If your child admits to cheating or is caught doing so, let her know how disappointed you are -- but also encourage her to tell you why she resorted to it so you can work together to find a better way. Does your child feel strapped for time because of after-school activities? Insist she drop one or two -- at least for now. Is she having trouble understanding material in class? Perhaps you can explain it or find a teacher or tutor who can. Is she feeling pressured by other kids to let them copy her work? Explain that this would be like helping them steal something -- and coach her in ways to respond. The bottom line when it comes to curbing cheating, Anderman says, is never to leave kids feeling helpless. "Make them feel you're their partner."
When Parents Cheat
Sure, it's important to sit down with your kids over their homework and get them excited about learning. But teachers can always tell if you go over the line. Among the practices that drive them crazy:
--Masterminding your kids' projects
--Completing their homework, instead of helping them understand it
--Fudging their reading logs
--Typing their homework for them (unless they have physical disabilities)
--Dictating answers to them
Why We Should Memorize
January 25, 2013
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html
Why We Should Memorize
Posted by Brad Leithauser
Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago: what we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time. But, surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them—those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac’s cul-de-sac.
Actually, if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I’m struck by how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet (“Hey,” I tell them, “pick a really famous one--Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—and you’ve already got the first line down”), and a number of them will painfully falter. They’re not used to memorizing much of anything.
In what would have been my prime recitation years had I been born in an earlier era—junior high and high school—little memorization was required of me. But in early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”), which brought in a haul of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer “Casey at the Bat” (“It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day”) and Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (whose title I mispronounced for decades), which netted me fifty-two cents and twenty-four cents respectively. Some Longfellow, some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and enough of his “The Ancient Mariner” to purchase a couple of candy bars.
It sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead-serious counsel lay behind my mother’s beaming encouragement. I think she was tacitly saying, “Stick with poetry—that’s where the money is.”
It turned out to be levelheaded advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry, and about stories and novels and essays—ultimately, about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words carefully deployed on a page.
* * * It’s tempting to sentimentalize an era in which poetry—memorized, recited poetry—held so prominent a place in the culture. But its once-substantial role turns out to be a mixed and complicated tale, as thoroughly chronicled in Catherine Robson’s new “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.” Reared in England, now a professor at N.Y.U., Robson compares classroom procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950). The rationales for verse recitation were many and sometimes mutually contradictory: to foster a lifelong love of literature; to preserve the finest accomplishments in the language down the generations; to boost self-confidence through a mastery of elocution; to help purge the idioms and accents of lower-class speech; to strengthen the brain through exercise; and so forth. And the construction of a canon—the choice of which poems ought to be assigned to students at various grade levels—grew out of a collision of nationalistic zeal, piety, commercial enterprise (the success or failure of various competitive “readers”—what we would call textbooks), thoughtless imitation, and a fair amount of what looks like happenstance.
Robson grounds her book with three “case studies.” (She occasionally takes on a dry, clinical tone.) The first is Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that survives today largely as a first line (“The boy stood on the burning deck”), with a vague suspicion that what follows has often been parodied. (Poor Tom Sawyer was afflicted by it in the classroom.) The second may be the most celebrated of eighteenth-century English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The third is a poem previously unknown to me, Charles Wolfe’s charming ballad “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Each poem was at one time universally embraced, both by society and by educators.
“The Burial of Sir John Moore” has a likably homespun texture and offers, from a pedagogical standpoint, a salutary lesson about the triumph of courage over grandeur. (General Moore died, in 1809, in Spain, while leading his troops to a magnificent long-shot victory over the French, and his last words were, “I hope my country will do me justice.” Military exigency did not allow time for a suitable burial—a lack for which the poem seeks to indemnify him.) But the other two poems look like extremely peculiar candidates for widespread memorization. The forty-line “Casabianca,” which was put to memory by countless pre-adolescents, is grotesquely grisly: it tells the tale of a boy sailor who, while prudence is shouting at him to beat a hasty retreat, dutifully remains at his post (“he would not go / Without his Father’s word; / That father, faint in death below, / His voice no longer heard”), and, as a consequence, is blown to smithereens. As for Gray’s lovely, leisurely, dusky elegy, nothing much happens in its hundred and twenty-eight lines, and, as a result, his many scene-setting stanzas are easily confused and transposed by the would-be memorizer; to hold it all in one’s head is a somewhat perverse feat, like those jigsaw-puzzle aficionados who, finding their task insufficiently challenging, put the puzzle together face-side-down.
Though “Casabianca” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” are actually nineteenth-century poems, they partake of that misty, moss-and-granite melancholy one associates with those of Gray’s contemporaries known as the Graveyard Poets (or the Boneyard Boys). These were a pallid bunch, for whom cemeteries were what bars and brothels would be for many French poets of the nineteenth century—a comfy home away from home. They were continually reminding us that we all have one foot in the grave. It’s a weighty burden to drop on the scrawny shoulders of some ten-year-old boy or girl, standing hunched and terrified before a scowling, correction-bent teacher.
* * * My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.
Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart.
I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered.
Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.
So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when--tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)
The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”
After all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’ nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the world. Here’s the poem in entirety:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear in February. Read his pieces on “Peter Pan,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and two ways of looking at fiction.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html
Why We Should Memorize
Posted by Brad Leithauser
Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago: what we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time. But, surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them—those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac’s cul-de-sac.
Actually, if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I’m struck by how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet (“Hey,” I tell them, “pick a really famous one--Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—and you’ve already got the first line down”), and a number of them will painfully falter. They’re not used to memorizing much of anything.
In what would have been my prime recitation years had I been born in an earlier era—junior high and high school—little memorization was required of me. But in early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”), which brought in a haul of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer “Casey at the Bat” (“It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day”) and Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (whose title I mispronounced for decades), which netted me fifty-two cents and twenty-four cents respectively. Some Longfellow, some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and enough of his “The Ancient Mariner” to purchase a couple of candy bars.
It sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead-serious counsel lay behind my mother’s beaming encouragement. I think she was tacitly saying, “Stick with poetry—that’s where the money is.”
It turned out to be levelheaded advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry, and about stories and novels and essays—ultimately, about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words carefully deployed on a page.
* * * It’s tempting to sentimentalize an era in which poetry—memorized, recited poetry—held so prominent a place in the culture. But its once-substantial role turns out to be a mixed and complicated tale, as thoroughly chronicled in Catherine Robson’s new “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.” Reared in England, now a professor at N.Y.U., Robson compares classroom procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950). The rationales for verse recitation were many and sometimes mutually contradictory: to foster a lifelong love of literature; to preserve the finest accomplishments in the language down the generations; to boost self-confidence through a mastery of elocution; to help purge the idioms and accents of lower-class speech; to strengthen the brain through exercise; and so forth. And the construction of a canon—the choice of which poems ought to be assigned to students at various grade levels—grew out of a collision of nationalistic zeal, piety, commercial enterprise (the success or failure of various competitive “readers”—what we would call textbooks), thoughtless imitation, and a fair amount of what looks like happenstance.
Robson grounds her book with three “case studies.” (She occasionally takes on a dry, clinical tone.) The first is Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that survives today largely as a first line (“The boy stood on the burning deck”), with a vague suspicion that what follows has often been parodied. (Poor Tom Sawyer was afflicted by it in the classroom.) The second may be the most celebrated of eighteenth-century English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The third is a poem previously unknown to me, Charles Wolfe’s charming ballad “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Each poem was at one time universally embraced, both by society and by educators.
“The Burial of Sir John Moore” has a likably homespun texture and offers, from a pedagogical standpoint, a salutary lesson about the triumph of courage over grandeur. (General Moore died, in 1809, in Spain, while leading his troops to a magnificent long-shot victory over the French, and his last words were, “I hope my country will do me justice.” Military exigency did not allow time for a suitable burial—a lack for which the poem seeks to indemnify him.) But the other two poems look like extremely peculiar candidates for widespread memorization. The forty-line “Casabianca,” which was put to memory by countless pre-adolescents, is grotesquely grisly: it tells the tale of a boy sailor who, while prudence is shouting at him to beat a hasty retreat, dutifully remains at his post (“he would not go / Without his Father’s word; / That father, faint in death below, / His voice no longer heard”), and, as a consequence, is blown to smithereens. As for Gray’s lovely, leisurely, dusky elegy, nothing much happens in its hundred and twenty-eight lines, and, as a result, his many scene-setting stanzas are easily confused and transposed by the would-be memorizer; to hold it all in one’s head is a somewhat perverse feat, like those jigsaw-puzzle aficionados who, finding their task insufficiently challenging, put the puzzle together face-side-down.
Though “Casabianca” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” are actually nineteenth-century poems, they partake of that misty, moss-and-granite melancholy one associates with those of Gray’s contemporaries known as the Graveyard Poets (or the Boneyard Boys). These were a pallid bunch, for whom cemeteries were what bars and brothels would be for many French poets of the nineteenth century—a comfy home away from home. They were continually reminding us that we all have one foot in the grave. It’s a weighty burden to drop on the scrawny shoulders of some ten-year-old boy or girl, standing hunched and terrified before a scowling, correction-bent teacher.
* * * My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.
Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart.
I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered.
Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.
So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when--tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)
The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”
After all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’ nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the world. Here’s the poem in entirety:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear in February. Read his pieces on “Peter Pan,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and two ways of looking at fiction.