I’m curious as to whether or not students have to memorize poetry these days. Perhaps it’s a lost art like penmanship, but I can’t think how lucky kids are today if they’re exempt from memorizing long-winded poems.
If I’d been a good memorizer, I would’ve considered acting. While I’m sure such a skill serves some greater purpose, I don’t think today’s world provides opportunities for gentlemen in dinner jackets to stand around our drawing rooms to spontaneously break into stanzas of Whitman, Wordsworth and Longfellow. At least such things do not take place in my drawing room.
I was traumatized by memorization in school, and it began in seventh grade. On the first day, I arrived in my English class at 12:20 after an institutional lunch that had left me queasy. At that time, the class was called Language Arts, and it was taught by a swarthy old woman who looked like Burl Ives in a wig and pantsuit. Both, by the way, were Confederate gray. We did not know that it was to be her final year in teaching, but had I not been a timid and frightened seventh-grader, I would’ve slipped her a note suggesting that she hang up the gloves by Christmas break.
Mrs. J. had a sort of speech impediment that suggested her Fixodent wasn’t working on her uppers, yet she insisted on reading us her class rules. Between my carb crash and the fact that her classroom in August was two degrees cooler than a pizza oven, I was ready for a nap, something that she expressly forbade.
After her litany of unacceptable behavior, she polled us to see where we stood in regard to grammar. “Who can tell me the eight parts of speech?” I suspect everyone could, as we were a generation raised on Schoolhouse Rock. We could sing every tune about adverbs, conjunctions, phrases and nouns. We knew how bills became law, and we could multiply like a savant. However, none of us had ever heard nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. called “The Eight Parts of Speech.” The room was silent.
It was silent until Mrs. J. shrieked with her dentures clacking that we’d have to go back to the very basics of grammar, and once she found out who our elementary school teachers were, she would be sending strongly worded letters to each of them, informing them about the disservice they had done us. English handbooks then flew off the shelves, and even though one mouthy girl tried to explain that we’d already had this information once we had understood what she’d asked, there was no turning back.
“Young lady, none of you knew what the eight parts of speech were a few minutes ago, and now you tell me that you do? I don’t believe you, so we’ll start from the beginning.”
I feel that much of that year was nothing but a review of previously covered material. The only new things were poetry and craft time. By the second week of school, everyone was going around calling her senile. Whether she had early dementia or had not had a smooth voyage through the menopause, something was messing with her arterial flow. She was known to make assignments and never call for them, and she was also guilty of “chasing a rabbit” in one class session, taking complete leave of the unit’s topic for weeks.
When we studied Dickens, she explained A Christmas Carol was written in staves, and we had to read aloud the first part in class. I don’t recall getting through the entire work as when we read about Christmas Past, she was suddenly reminded of gumball trees. Our assignment was to go home and find a big twig that had multiple small branches. Our fathers were supposed to paint it white, assuming that everyone still had fathers who could and would do that sort of thing. When we brought it back to class, she helped us mount them, and we spent a week forcing gumdrops onto the ends of the branches. I thought the assignment as stupid at the time as I do now. The only good thing was that it killed another week between Thanksgiving and winter break.
Maybe she suffered from multiple personalities, but I never found one that I liked. I could deal with the docile granny who read out the recipe for the perfect bath, and I could feel secure with the sports nut who made us read a story about football great Fran Tarkington in the Reader’s Digest even though hearing a classroom full of near-illiterates take turns with the paragraphs had me thinking about running through the room’s glass-block wall without a helmet. However, the person she became when she was upset was the one that had me quaking in my boots.
