Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

+1. I can’t believe OP thinks memorizing is something worth praising and recommending.

Memorization is part of learning. It is a simple as that. How did you learn your times tables?

Except this is not how kids learn their times tables now! There are all kinds of strategies that teachers incorporate into learning multiplication and division. Researchers discovered long ago that rote memorization does not work for many kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

+1. I can’t believe OP thinks memorizing is something worth praising and recommending.

Memorization is part of learning. It is a simple as that. How did you learn your times tables?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

+1

Yes there is. How much class time will be used to memorize a 3 stanza poem? Way more than you think. It is a waste of time.

What do you want to bet that Georgia and Arkansas have *gasp* homework? Do you really think students are memorizing their poems during class time?

Of course Fairfax students cannot possibly memorize anything. They cannot spare the time...

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

Bingo!!! Memorizing is not learning! Applying knowledge show mastery in learning.

If you don’t commit knowledge to memory how can you master anything? Do you people listen to yourselves?

Amazing what the downward slide in education in the US over the last 40 years has led to, if not for COVID the momentum would have been unstoppable.

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

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

+1

Yes there is. How much class time will be used to memorize a 3 stanza poem? Way more than you think. It is a waste of time.

What do you want to bet that Georgia and Arkansas have *gasp* homework? Do you really think students are memorizing their poems during class time?

Of course Fairfax students cannot possibly memorize anything. They cannot spare the time...

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

+1. I can’t believe OP thinks memorizing is something worth praising and recommending.

Memorization is part of learning. It is a simple as that. How did you learn your times tables?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

+1

Yes there is. How much class time will be used to memorize a 3 stanza poem? Way more than you think. It is a waste of time.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

+1

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

+1. I can’t believe OP thinks memorizing is something worth praising and recommending.

Memorization is part of learning. It is a simple as that. How did you learn your times tables?

Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

Bingo!!! Memorizing is not learning! Applying knowledge show mastery in learning.

Memorizing is quite literally learning. How do you think kids get the knowledge that they are supposed to “show mastery” of?

Memorizing something you will utilize is one thing. Yes, I'd like my doctors to memories the bones in my body.
Memorizing the Gettysburg address? Not so useful. So, I don't the benefit of these new "standards."

And my DD took a public speaking class in HS and is in speech and debate. Those opportunities are already there for kids who want them.

Memorizing the Gettysburg address? Not so useful. So, I don't the benefit of these new "standards."

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Memorizing classic words doesn’t mean they understand them. I’d rather my child understand the purpose and meaning without being able to recite word for word.

Bingo!!! Memorizing is not learning! Applying knowledge show mastery in learning.

Memorizing is quite literally learning. How do you think kids get the knowledge that they are supposed to “show mastery” of?