doing memory work

[UPDATED 6/10-- This is where my Mnemosyne templates can be found now, if you want to do this in a binder. The link goes to the second edition, a bit prettier than the first one, but most of all, bigger, sized for a normal binder rather than the little DayTimer sized ones. It also has a new form for recording works memorized. I tried to make the instructions more clear, too. But here below are the old instructions and examples and whatnot.]

Mnemosyne is our memory work system, pronounced nem-os-in-ee and named after the Greek goddess of memory, mother of the muses. It’s basically a bunch of dividers in a binder. Each divider has a day on it: Today, Odd Days, Even Days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the 1st of the month, the 2nd of the month, and so on, up to the 30th of the month. In the very back is a divider called Future. Pieces to be memorized on pieces of paper behind Future until they are called forward to be worked on. We place them in Today until they’re memorized. Then we move then back to Odd and pull a new piece forward to Today. As more pieces are memorized, each of the already-memorized is bumped back a divider. This system allows the least familiar stuff to be reviewed most.

In our daily routine, the Scientist, my nine-year-old, generally does Mnemosyne first. This is so I can first do the lessons that the Hero can tag along on. Being so thoroughly three-and-eleven-months old, Hero starts out each day jumping at the bit to do school. If I put him off, he will ask me, "When will we do math?" every forty-five seconds all through our seatwork time. If I give him the first lesson block of the day, afterwards he’ll wiggle away and play contently for the rest of the morning.

All I have to do to start the Scientist up is collapse into my armchair in the school room, point groggily at the boy and say, "Mnemosynuuugh I miss coffee." He takes his little binder over to the calendar, looking up his assignments, sweating over the one behind Today, and reciting the rest with whatever feeling he can muster. (He’s not big on pretending, and this is too much like acting which is too much like pretending.)

The Scientist can do this independently because all of the prep work has been done. Pieces have to be selected. Children have to be taught how to memorize. Standards must be established for what constitutes an acceptable level of memorization.

We selected pieces for The Future section of the Storyteller’s binder when it went empty again around July this year, conveniently at the start of our new school quarter. We ransacked our favorite sources for materials, choosing our usual Ogden Nash and Hillaire Belloc, a disproportionate amount of fact lists, and some prayers for use in formal worship times.

All told, we ended up with about a dozen medium to small pieces, things like states and their capitals. Last year we had many more pieces, but they were all much smaller. I hope to increase the size of the works and decrease the amount of works until eighth grade, when, I have heard tell, many homeschooled children memorize just one to four very very long works. I can see it. The Gamer, our twelve-year-old, could memorize in 20 minutes flat any of the sort of stuff Scientist’s doing this year.

No matter the size of the pieces, we only put one sheet at a time behind any divider, and I require memorizing just that one sheet before it is moved back.

I taught the Scientist to memorize using two different techniques, depending on the type of work. For poetry or anything that has a sensible pattern to it, I asked him to only rote memorize a few keywords. Wherever there’s a natural end within the piece, look at the next word and memorize that. It’s kind of subjective, but here’s a recent example.

Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn’t care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear’s big mouth was cruel and cavernous.

Once you hear Isabel, the first two lines flow from whatever part of our brain memorizes rhythms. But then he was consistently getting stumped on the next line. So he memorized Isabel – The bear. He remembered that those were his prompts, and he was able to say the whole four lines easily.

For pieces that don’t have any innate sense, like states and capitals, he uses an ancient Greek trick. Create a building to represent the piece and see yourself walking through it, with landmarks to represent the key points and twists and turns to tell you when and how the piece moves.

The Greek trick would never work for me. The Scientist has an awesome spatial memory, but I get lost in two bedroom houses. When I memorize something, I take a mental snapshot of the page, including curves of the font, smudges on the page, patterns unintentionally formed by the punctuation marks. Then I can pull it up in my internal library and read it off the book in my head.

There are tons of memory techniques out there. Let Google be your guide.

Our simple standard for what constitutes memorized is: you have to be able to say it with your eyes closed in a normal speed. Rushing through so no one can understand doesn’t count. At first I did allow the kids to move on when they could do this, but I found that those pieces didn’t stick in their heads. I’m not sure what’s up with that, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? When I make them slow down, they do things like succumb to siblings making silly faces to get them to laugh in the middle, or sucking on their fingers during the hard verses. That, I allow, so long as they recover quickly enough for us to know where the line break was supposed to be.

I haven’t used Mnemosyne with my twelve-year-old because he’s been experimenting with non-classical forms of education for a while. I still don’t know what he’s doing this year. Essentially I’m waiting for one of his other parents to sign paperwork before I set up his system. You can probably assume that everything above applies, except that assigning the Gamer and the Scientist to do Mnemosyne at the same time would be a recipe for disaster. They’d both be drawn to the calendar to check the date. When they’re within two feet of each other, the cone of goofy activates and comes down around them. I’m shuddering just imagining what it would be like if the cone of goofy came down first thing every morning.

I’m not using Mnemosyne with my six-year-old this year because he does not have great auditory skills. It’s pretty much the worst possible input mechanism for him. He asked me if he could copy his memory work over and over until he had it memorized. I agreed. I suspect he’s doing something like I do, memorizing the visual image of the piece. He’s memorizing easier than he did last year, but I’m having a hard time keeping track of what he should review when. I may try to get my hands on a laminator so that he can still use the binder system with a write-on/wipe-off marker.

If I had another kid doing Mnemosyne, I would definitely get a binder for each.

I don’t think I’ll attempt memory work with the Hero until he can read easily, for three reasons.

First of all, a pre-reader doesn't need assignments to memorize things. He has to memorize everything. Before children can read, their memory is much better because they have to rely on it much more. One the reasons we do memory work is to keep that innate capacity for memory active.

A second reason to do memory work is to ensure that children have daily experience imbibing reliably correct and sophisticated English. That’s Andrew Pudewa’s term, and his idea. He believes that you can’t get reliably correct and sophisticated English out of a brain that never had any put into it. Internet, television, comic books, etc., don’t provide this, peers don’t, and adults don’t always, either. We learned when I tried to transcribe a recording of a dinner party that we pretty much exclusively speak in fragments at my house. Children who read to themselves a lot tend to be fast readers who know how to skip the long pretty passages describing the landscape, who can glean meaning quickly at a glance then get to the good stuff. But when children are pre-readers, parents have to read aloud to them a lot, or they get no book time at all. So these young children already have a streaming source of correct and sophisticated English.

Third, and definitely most importantly for me, there’s something else prereaders need more: to learn to read. Little kids are squirmy and only can handle so much lesson time in any given day. Why waste good reading lesson time on a less essential subject? There isn’t anything else more important or more basic, or anything you can do with your four- to seven-year-old to make homeschooling easier when you start in earnest.

So there. I’ve written you a four page ramble covering everything I can think to cover about memory work.

I'm happy to answer any questions. Leave 'em in the comment box.