New educational standards in Georgia and Arkansas - hope you’re paying attention, FCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most kids don't memorize all the time, but the idea of memorizing one thing a year whether your speech on your project or a poem or the preamble helps you understand how words really matter and just builds that skill of committing information to memory. Just like learning math helps you with problem solving.

I can memorize anything without understanding it, or wanting to understand it. It means nothing.

I knew a particular poem by heart, but I didn't understand any of it until I was an adult because when I was younger, I didn't like poetry. It meant nothing to me.

This accomplishes nothing.

Math is different where you have building blocks, math knowledge builds on math knowledge.

Memorizing a particular poem doesn't help you understand complex text. It will only be helpful if you have to analyze the text, not just memorize it.

And as many have already said, kids who do this are often required to analyze the passages and say it out loud - both of which reinforces critical thinking skills and public speaking ability. Honestly, seems like some of you are really stretching for any reason to claim there is something wrong with this. It's something that all good private schools incorporate into their classrooms.

Does it state that the kids have to analyze the text as well as memorize it? If not, then my point still stands.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Sadly I don’t think this is sarcasm.

The battle at Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War. Had Lee been victorious he would have had a stranglehold on the north while Sherman would have had a similar hold on the South. A standoff. The US would have split in two.

That is why learning about the battle and what it led to is important.

Aren't you satisfied with yourself? One can learn the bolded w/o memorizing the Gettysburg address. But you already know that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

The vast vast majority of us have not memorized the US constitution, yet, we understand the principle of it without having to memorize it.

Really, there is no point in memorizing poems and texts. Study sure, memorize, not necessary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Sadly I don’t think this is sarcasm.

The battle at Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War. Had Lee been victorious he would have had a stranglehold on the north while Sherman would have had a similar hold on the South. A standoff. The US would have split in two.

That is why learning about the battle and what it led to is important.

Aren't you satisfied with yourself? One can learn the bolded w/o memorizing the Gettysburg address. But you already know that.

Of course, you can learn about the battle without memorizing the Gettysburg Address. But, memorizing the Gettysburg Address brings a whole different layer of understanding to it.
No. You don't have to memorize the Gettysburg Address, but you are missing out if you have never done this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Imagine, being required to memorize a recite passages from famous works of literature! Such a novel idea. /s Is this happening in FCPS?

New ed­u­ca­tional stan­dards in Geor­gia and Ar­kansas in­clude mod­est-sound­ing re­quire­ments that are in fact rev­o­lu­tion­ary.

In Geor­gia stu­dents will be re­quired to build “back­ground knowl­edge” by recit­ing all or part of sig­nif­i­cant po­ems and speeches. The Ar­kansas plan calls for stu­dents to re­cite a pas­sage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That’s it: an old-fash­ioned de­mand that stu­dents mem­o­rize the Get­tys­burg Ad­dress or Ham­let’s “To be or not to be” or Gwen­dolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and re­cite it to an au­di­ence.

Most par­ents would prob­a­bly call this a wor­thy ex­er­cise, fos­ter­ing the courage to speak in pub­lic and fir­ing the ado­les­cent imag­i­na­tion. Who could ob­ject to lodg­ing mem­o­rable words in teenage heads oth­er­wise packed with Tik­Tok videos?

Eng­lish teach­ers, that’s who. Mod­ern ed­u­ca­tors view mem­o­riza-tion as empty rep­e­ti­tion, me­chan­i-cal and pre­scrip­tive rather than cre­ative or thought­ful. Recit­ing texts from mem­ory, they say, merely drops in­for­ma­tion into stu­dents’ minds. It’s rote learn­ing in­stead of crit­i­cal analy­sis.

That’s wrong. Recita­tion al­lows stu­dents to ex­pe­ri­ence a text as a liv­ing thing, ready to be taken up by a new gen­er­a­tion. Com­mit­ting a poem or speech to mem­ory means step­ping into the au­thor’s shoes and pon­der­ing what he meant. De­cid­ing which words to stress when recit­ing means think­ing about what those words mean. This is why pub­lic speak­ing was once a re­quire­ment at many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.

In our age of so­cial me­dia and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, the prac­tice of recita­tion has never been more needed. Mem­o­riz­ing clas­sic words re­minds us that they are alive.

Ar­kansas and Geor­gia have some­thing even stronger than ped­a­gog­i­cal the­ory to jus­tify the new—or, rather, old—stan­dards. Watch the faces of par­ents as they lis­ten to their chil­dren urg­ing us all to­ward what Mar­tin Luther King Jr. called “a dream deeply rooted in the Amer­i­can dream,” or say­ing with Robert Frost, “I have been one ac­quainted with the night,” or with Shake­speare, “To­mor­row and to­mor­row and to­mor­row . . .”

When young re­citers re­turn to their seats, they know they have made age­less words their own. What par­ents and stu­dents feel at that mo­ment tran­scends a good grade. For a few min­utes, striv­ing teens be­come King, Frost or Shake­speare.

“Every man is an or­a­tor,” Ralph Waldo Emer­son wrote. “The elo­quence of one stim­u­lates all the rest . . . to a de­gree that makes them good re­ceivers and con­duc­tors.” Recit­ing clas­sic lines brings past elo­quence into the present, turn­ing us into re­ceivers and con­duc­tors. When we weigh the words of in­flu­en­tial men and women and re­al­ize they are still use­ful, we all ben­e­fit. Geor­gia and Ar­kansas un­der­stand this. Let’s hope many more states fol­low their lead.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kids-and-the-power-of-the-spoken-word-georgia-arkansas-memory-classics-c55366e4

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read. I have a PhD in literature and can't imagine any reason at all why one would need to memorize the words of any particular piece of literature. What a waste of time. Memorizing words of some random poem but not having any idea why that poem is significant sounds like just the kind of thing a person who doesn't really understand literature would think was an important thing to do.

+1

+2 The time required to memorize and then recite would be better spent contextualizing the work or reading other works.

If it's either/or, I'll take contextualizing. But FCPS has chosen neither/nor. Which seems to be many parents' preference.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

The vast vast majority of us have not memorized the US constitution, yet, we understand the principle of it without having to memorize it.

Really, there is no point in memorizing poems and texts. Study sure, memorize, not necessary.

Are you sure about that?

[Anonymous]

Kids can do this in theater or speech class. Not sure it makes sense to prioritize this in English class when writing takes so much time to teach well and IMO is worthy of more effort.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

The vast vast majority of us have not memorized the US constitution, yet, we understand the principle of it without having to memorize it.

Really, there is no point in memorizing poems and texts. Study sure, memorize, not necessary.

Are you sure about that?

well, some people do, but do you really think that those who don't understand the principles of the Constitution would better understand it if they memorized it?

Anyone can memorize words strung together; it doesn't mean they understand what those words mean.

Analyzing the text is definitely worthwhile, but there's really no point in memorizing it. You don't need to memorize it to understand the basic principles of the text.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Sadly I don’t think this is sarcasm.

The battle at Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War. Had Lee been victorious he would have had a stranglehold on the north while Sherman would have had a similar hold on the South. A standoff. The US would have split in two.

That is why learning about the battle and what it led to is important.

Aren't you satisfied with yourself? One can learn the bolded w/o memorizing the Gettysburg address. But you already know that.

Of course, you can learn about the battle without memorizing the Gettysburg Address. But, memorizing the Gettysburg Address brings a whole different layer of understanding to it.
No. You don't have to memorize the Gettysburg Address, but you are missing out if you have never done this.

Have you memorized it? The declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in US history- I'm assuming that you have memorized at least the preamble. FDR's December 8 address to Congress is at least as important as the Gettysburg address, have you memorized it? Ike's letter in the event D-Day failed demonstrates the enormity of the event- have you memorized it? Have you memorized JFK's speech at the Berlin Wall? Reagan's? There are probably 100 other speeches and documents as important as what I've listed, do you think students should just spend their days memorizing them?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

The vast vast majority of us have not memorized the US constitution, yet, we understand the principle of it without having to memorize it.

Really, there is no point in memorizing poems and texts. Study sure, memorize, not necessary.

Are you sure about that?

well, some people do, but do you really think that those who don't understand the principles of the Constitution would better understand it if they memorized it?

Anyone can memorize words strung together; it doesn't mean they understand what those words mean.

Analyzing the text is definitely worthwhile, but there's really no point in memorizing it. You don't need to memorize it to understand the basic principles of the text.

Other than a parlor trick, nobody, including constitutional scholars, is memorizing the whole constitution.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Kids can do this in theater or speech class. Not sure it makes sense to prioritize this in English class when writing takes so much time to teach well and IMO is worthy of more effort.

Okay. Let's make speech class required. It was when I was in school. Because it's important.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kids can do this in theater or speech class. Not sure it makes sense to prioritize this in English class when writing takes so much time to teach well and IMO is worthy of more effort.

Okay. Let's make speech class required. It was when I was in school. Because it's important.

My kid would rather have the slot for an extra AP science class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You need not MEMORIZE it to learn about it, and they why of its importance.

Do you have it memorized? I don't. And I could still tell you about it.

+1

The vast vast majority of us have not memorized the US constitution, yet, we understand the principle of it without having to memorize it.

Really, there is no point in memorizing poems and texts. Study sure, memorize, not necessary.

Are you sure about that?

well, some people do, but do you really think that those who don't understand the principles of the Constitution would better understand it if they memorized it?

Anyone can memorize words strung together; it doesn't mean they understand what those words mean.

Analyzing the text is definitely worthwhile, but there's really no point in memorizing it. You don't need to memorize it to understand the basic principles of the text.

Other than a parlor trick, nobody, including constitutional scholars, is memorizing the whole constitution.

right, and yet, many of us know the principles of it without having ever memorized it.