build a long rope: how to memorize long passages

It is said that “Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.” (It’s a Chinese proverb, I believe.)

Regardless of whether or not you are a fan of memorization, no one can ignore the fact that we do have to remember something/be able to recall it to actually learn it, apply it, and create with it. That’s one of the main reasons memorizing takes its place as the base of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Being able to recall facts creates the ability for a student– for all of us– to be able to begin wrapping our minds around it, applying it to our lives and situation, analyzing connections, evaluating what we are learning… with the hopes that we can create something new out of it.

We can talk forever about how our current educational system might rely too much on remembering, or mistake remembering for education itself… and I actually have strong thoughts and feelings about that: as a teacher in a classroom for years myself (high school and college), I have definitely felt very frustrated about how pre-assessing and assessing and post-assessing whether or not students learned content was basically just memory-based– when learning is so. much. more!

But that’s not the point of this post. 😀

The point is: we DO need memory. Memory is the foundation for us not just to remember things, but to work and play with information and thought and art in our own heads: to “follow us” by simply being with us. Within us.

I have memorized A LOT in my educational journey. Not just for tests and quizzes, but for performance. Part of my undergrad and graduate degree requirements were me, myself, and I creating and performing 50 minute to 1hr and 10 minute one-woman shows. That’s a LOT of memorization.

But the memorization was just the first step. It was the first way for me to get that text in my head… to trickle down into my heart. I can’t tell you how many times I would be rehearsing the memory in my head, and suddenly I would get light-bulb moments about what the text really meant and how I could perform it. Suddenly, I would understand the characters in the story or the lines in the poetry I didn’t– and wouldn’t– without having it secure in my mind first.

Memorizing passage– classical and religious– is something we do in our home because I believe in the value of having thoughts, not just words, shape the hearts and the minds of my children.

So, how do you do it? How do you learn long passages? And to take it one more step… how can you get your students to do it as you use it in your home and homelearning?

In this very “amateur” video (because I don’t have equipment and a fancy home studio or anything. Instead, you get to join me at my kitchen table with a chalkboard in the background, ha!), I go through what I have done, what you can do, and how you can adapt the long-passage memory technique for little people and slip it into your morning time easily.

When you watch the video, you’ll completely understand what I mean by building “a long rope,” and how easy it is to actually do it!