Recitation
What we call the "memorization assignment" is much more than it sounds!
This year, students will have the opportunity to memorize, analyze, recite, and explain lines of both poetry and prose. Sometimes students will recite, explain, and be evaluated by teachers, sometimes by students, sometimes by administrators, and sometimes even by PARENTS (scary!).
Robert Penn Warren, the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry, has this to say about memorization:
"When I was in school we were graded on memorization and on whether we had gotten the feel of a poem. At Vanderbilt in the freshman English course, I had to memorize at least 500 lines a term. Today, young people aren't obliged to do that. When I taught at Yale I would often ask students in a seminar which of them could quote a poem all the way through. Only once did I ever get a person who could do so. Modern youngsters never had a chance to learn
anything about poetry. It's the practicality of a world in which education no longer teaches you
how to live, just how to learn to make a living. A whole side of the self is gone."
- Robert Penn Warren
Although brain researchers note the positive effects of memorization for cognitive health, in Introduction to the Humanities we use memorization as a stepping stone to many other goals. Here are a few that our memorization assignment supports:
1. Commentator David Brooks points out that people think by analogy, by comparison. Having key passages at your beck and call helps you think by comparing situations in your life to those which have inspired great writers to set down in words beautiful thoughts.
2. Students learn how to interact with people, how to be polite and mature when meeting someone new. We practice it in class!
3. Students not only have to know the words but they have to be able to explain it in an extemporaneous conversation.
4. Students get to meet with a humanities teacher one-on-one to be "tested" over the meaning of text and how text connects to life. This is a very student-friendly assessment in which students have many ways to express what they have learned.
5. Students will be empowered to choose lines (per instructions in class) that are meaningful to them and will have the opportunity to explain why.
6. Students will sometimes recite and discuss lines with parents/guardians ... so if they come to you, ask lots of questions!
Attached to the bottom of this page are the rubrics we will use this year (subject to revisions). These are on-going assignments that students can complete at any time in the quarter per the instructions for each assignment. The due dates are the final dates by which completed rubrics must be turned in. Don't wait until the last minute! Please note that the lines to be memorized are cumulative. By the end of the year, students must know them all.
Quarter 1 #1
- from Shakespeare's Hamlet (see lines below)
- from essays by Sir Francis Bacon (see lines below)
- Emerson quotation from Self Reliance
Quarter 2
- all of quarter 1 lines plus ...
- invocation from The Odyssey
Quarter 3
- all of lines from quarters 1 and 2 plus ...
- from the Middle East Unit (students will choose)
- from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (students will choose)
Quarter 4
- all of the lines from quarters 1, 2, and 3 plus ...
- from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (student choice)
Here are the core set of lines to know. Even if we mix up this assignment a bit, these will always be a part of it:
lines from Hamlet:
What a piece of work is man,
how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god,
the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals.
- Shakespeare, Hamlet II, ii
Emerson lines:
It's easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it's easy in solitude to live after our own;
but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude..."
- Emerson Self Reliance
Sir Francis Bacon lines:
#1 - Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
#2 - Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
#3 - Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them.
The assignment pages and rubrics are below. The rubrics stay pretty much the same; the number of points go up as the number of memorized texts increased.