LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Are We Forgetting to Remember?

Memorization used to be more common in school than it is now.  Should we bring it back?  From Sunday's NY Times:

Britney? That’s All She Rote

By JENNY LYN BADER

OOPS! Britney Spears forgot the words she meant to lip-sync at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday. With this momentary brain malfunction, she joined the absent-minded ranks of “American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee, who dropped a line from her medley of “Hound Dog/All Shook Up” in last year’s finals, and Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, who plumb forgot what she was saying in a pageant interview that became a YouTube sensation.

Performance anxiety, heavy drinking and even hair extensions have been variously blamed for these lapses. But why blame the victims? They are just products of a culture that does not enforce the development of memory skills.

It’s gotten easy to forget to teach young people how to remember. The Victorian ideal of encyclopedic knowledge has fallen away. While it used to be possible for one person to know all there was to know, with our current explosion of information, one person could never know it all. And said person isn’t even motivated to know a little bit — certainly not by heart.

As storage space on computer chips increases, human data storage decreases. With cellphones, no one even knows phone numbers anymore. Given the rise of Web search engines, facts that used to be reliably in our brains are now at our fingertips, if we can remember our passwords.

Oration and recitation, once staples of the American school system, have largely been phased out. Rhetoric programs at universities have narrowed, merged with communications departments, or been eliminated altogether.

Read the rest here. 

 

See You in Las Cruces

It's not too late to plan to attend the 2007 New Mexico Council of Teachers of English conference.  It will be held at the Mesilla Valley Best Western in Las Cruces on September 28 and 29 and will feature Harvey Daniels (Literature Circles:  Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups) and Kylene Beers (When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do:  A Guide for Teachers 6-12).  Read more about it and register at www.nmcte.org. 

English and More English

Stanford University professor Seth Lerer has written a very interesting and accessible history of the English language, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007).  We'd tell you more about it here, but it's more informative and entertaining to hear him talk about it, which you can do by clicking here.  While you're at it (especially if you're teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn this year) you should download the chapter from Lerer's book about "Mark Twain and the Making of the American Idiom."