<p>I had a little conversation with Mmaah in another thread about strange things we were once required to memorize that we still remember MANY years later. For example, I had to memorize a list of fifty prepositions in 1968 and I can still rattle them off, and I still know all of the counties and county seats in the state of Washington, a remnant of the state history class I had in 1973 or so. And Mmaah can recite the first sentence of Canterbury Tales in the original English.</p>
<p>What do you have lingering from your school years? How long ago did you memorize it? And do your kids still have to memorize things?</p>
<p>In my elementary school, we had to memorize poems and recite them in front of the class. One year, I did “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and I can still remember parts of it.</p>
<p>“The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.”</p>
<p>But what I remember best is the Dr. Seuss books that I read to my kids. Over and over. And over. And over. I can recite the entire Cat in the Hat and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish off the top of my head. Do you remember this part?</p>
<p>“Look what we found in the park in the dark. We will take him home. We will call him Clark. He will live at our house. He will grow and grow. Will our mother like this? We don’t know.” (Are we really sure Dr. Seuss was not a mom?)</p>
<p>My daughter used to be present at her older brother’s Cub Scout den meetings because I was one of the leaders. She can still do the Cub Scout Promise and the Law of the Pack. And the 12 points of the Scout Law. In order. This is a fairly useless skill for a woman.</p>
<p>From my pre-college days, I can recite the second paragraph of the Declaration of Indepence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”), the Gettysburg Address, several Shakespearean sonnets and soliloquies, several e.e. cummings and T.S. Eliot poems, “Jabberwocky” (which I can also sentence-diagram for you, talk about a lost skill…), and the books of the New Testament (that one came from Sunday School). (And large sections of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” which came slightly later, and Firesign Theatre albums, neither of which were school/church-related.) My kids have had to memorize pieces of Shakespearean plays, but they didn’t learn any of the others, in particular none of the text from the historical documents. They, unlike me, had to learn all the state capitals.</p>
<p>I think I only ever quote “Jabberwocky”, Holy Grail, and Firesign in normal conversation anymore. (Which is weird enough to admit.)</p>
<p>I can remember Ronsard’s sonnet “Mignonne, alons voir si la rose . . .”, the closing soliloquy from Racine’s Phedre, and Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, all from 11th or 12th Grade. I can’t quite remember all of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” from the same period. I don’t think I can remember all of the Gettysburg Address or “Jabberwocky”, both of which were probably 4th Grade. </p>
<p>I certainly can recite a number of children’s books. Not Dr. Seuss, I don’t think, but absolutely “Jamberry” and Sandy Boynton’s incomparable “Moo, Baa, La-La-La”. Also lots of the poems in “When We Were Very Young.”</p>
<p>My kids will sometimes spontaneously recite all of the poems from the The Dark Is Rising series. That wasn’t a school thing, though. And I still know lots of the songs from Tolkein books, which I memorized (not for school) in 6th Grade. The “Tannhauser” sonnet from Gravity’s Rainbow, too.</p>
<p>My kids have not been assigned to memorize all that much. My daughter does it anyway; she has a fabulous memory for poetry and song lyrics. I think she can do Stevens’ “The Idea Of Order At Key West” on command, and “Prufrock” and a lot of Plath’s Ariel poems. And my son is, as I write this, involved in a Shakespeare competition, which requires reciting a sonnet and a 20-line monologue from memory. He can still do the ones he performed last year, too.</p>
<p>My kids can also recite all the Presidents in order, but only if they hum the Animaniacs song about them while they are doing it.</p>
<p>We are long-separated siblings, apparently. </p>
<p>“Under the bridge and over the dam. Looking for berries, berries for jam.”</p>
<p>… And I have been repeatedly chastised, harrassed and insulted for letting my son take my wife’s only Boynton beach towel to a party where he promptly lost it. I actually managed to get in touch with Sandra’s sister, who said they are no longer being manufactured, but offered to send me one of her own. I was deeply touched, but declined. I couldn’t imagine depriving someone else of their Boynton memorabilia. I’m sure you’ll understand, JHS.</p>
<p>“One berry, two berry, pick me a blueberry!” “Raspberry, Jazzberry, Razzmatazzberry!” (Bruce Degen, though, not Sandra.)</p>
<p>“With some on top and some beneath, they brush and brush and brush their teeth.” From The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton, our kids’ favorite.</p>
<p>Oh, and my #2 son and I sing Tom Lehrer duets and recite Monty Python to one another. He memorized and recited The Elements for extra credit in his 8th grade science class.</p>
<p>I was very lucky that my parents took some interest in classical poetry and theatre. When, beginning at 11, they would tell me that for each of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I memorized they would allow me an afternoon on our beach or something else I wanted that was of some special value to me.</p>
<p>Having run through all of them; Hamlet’s soliloquies, then the poetry of Frost, then, as JHS, The Wasteland and Prufrock, then “The Idea of Order in Key West”, “Emperor of Ice Cream” and more of Stevens; this all in addition to the classical poetry of Hafez and Sadi.</p>
<p>I look back on it as one of the better things my parents ever did for me. Even then I enjoyed it and was thrilled that I “owned” these pieces of literature: All of Shakespeare’s sonnets and allot more that has influenced my thinking and writing and outlook ever since.</p>
<p>“235-0320 is a number you should know.” <em>recited in a sing-song voice</em></p>
<p>Believe it or not, this was required to be committed to memory by Wellesley students in our day. Theory being we might be stranded somewhere/find ourself in an untenable situation with a “gentleman caller”/whatever… and we should call Wellesley to the rescue.</p>
<p>Maidens in distress, I guess. How times have changed.</p>
<p>If you can do all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and “The Wasteland”, and “The Idea of Order at Key West”, not to mention Persian poetry . . . well, my hat’s off to you.</p>
<p>“Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle-sifter, thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb. Now, if Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle-sifter, thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb, see that THOU, in sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles, thrust NOT three thousand thistles through the thick of thy thumb. Success to the successful thistle sifter!”</p>
<p>A legacy from my 7th grade speech teacher. Being able to deliver that tongue-twister, error-free, in fifteen seconds or fewer, was essential to an A in speech. My grade: B-.</p>
<p>“I can still name the capital of every state and can recite the first line of Finnegans Wake, but don’t ask me the names of my children…”</p>
<p>The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the
pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself
prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his
tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the
park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst
loved livvy.</p>
<p>I can still remember all of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, which used to be my favorite poem until I discovered Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and NY State’s own former poet laureate, Sharon Olds.</p>
<p>ok mini – you baited me: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.</p>
<p>In seventh grade, the presidents…I still get stuck and slow down at Nixon, because he was the one I stopped at then.</p>
<p>But, more interestingly, when i was on a summer semester in England and Ireland in college, reading lit where it was written/set, we had to memorize “Under Ben Bulben” in order to recite it after climbing to the top of Ben Bulben, facing down to Yeats’ grave.</p>
<p>“Swear by what the sages spoke, round the Mareotic Lake” (not sure of the spelling there.)</p>
<p>The prof in charge got really annoyed, because in the days leading up to that, the ten of us in the program practiced in the van in a round robin fashion, syllable by syllable. Looking back, I can see how that annoyed a Yeats scholar…</p>
<p>LOL. I didn’t read *Jamberry *quite enough to get it memorized. But I can still do Freight Train by Donald Crews, the first book my son memorized. I can also do “Mignonne allons voir si la rose”, which quite surprised me recently. And “La lune blanche, luit dane les bois” too! My tour de force though is Tennyson’s “Ulysses” which takes a full five minutes to recite.</p>
<p>Mathson, on the other hand, can do pi to some ridiculous number of places.</p>