Ch. 2: "LEARNING" YOUR LESSONS

Preparing for a Recitation

I was thinking some more about the whole memorization thing today, and I remembered my grandmother (b. 1898) occasionally asking my sisters and me of an evening, back in the early '60's, when we were little girls, "Have you learned your lessons yet?" Not, "Have you done your homework yet?", but "Have you learned your lessons yet?" Learned our lessons? What's that supposed to mean? Now, why we didn't just ask her what she meant, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure we just chalked it up to some old-fashioned way of asking about our homework.

But now I'm not so sure about that. I haven't run into that wording anywhere else in my research, but I'm tempted to wonder if by whether we'd "learned" our lessons, she didn't actually mean, had we memorized our lessons. I can't substantiate my hunch (I'll keep looking), but it just seems logical that although she was probably aware of the fact that Recitations were already a thing of the past, she might still have just used the wording she was familiar with from her own schooldays, when "Have you learned your lessons?" might have actually meant, "Have you got everything memorized? Are you ready to recite?".

Which then got me thinking further. The Recitation went the way of the dinosaur when consolidated, centralized, graded schools came on the scene. That's understandable. What has me scratching my head, though, is the fact that we don't even have a collective memory of there ever having been such a thing as "Recitation", much less what it actually was, or how it was conducted. How in the world did something so important to American education for so long, go POOF! down the memory hole?

Indeed, we have so completely lost the concept of the recitation method of teaching, that I've seen re-creations on TV of 19th century schoolrooms, where the teacher is teaching as if she were in a modern-day graded classroom. It doesn't look authentic, because it isn't. Graded classrooms were, are, and must be, taught in an entirely different way (the way you and I were taught); a way that is wholely unsuited to the one-room, multi-graded classroom.

Notice in the photograph above (click to enlarge) how the students are all busy studying their lessons, perhaps each one a different subject or grade level, yet the teacher is not teaching. Why? Isn't that a little odd? With so many grades to cover, wouldn't you expect the teacher to take any spare moment she could, while the others were occupied, to teach one grade or another? How can she fit teaching each grade each subject into each day's schedule if she doesn't spend every minute teaching something to somebody? I know that's what I had to do, and I only had three to six grades to teach at a time, not eight.

Well, it's my belief that the teacher is not teaching, because other than a few minutes each to review and preview, at each Recitation time, teachers did not spend their time in front of a class teaching. The teacher's primary teaching job was to conduct Recitations. In between Recitations, she graded papers or prepared the next Recitation. And what did the students do in between their own Recitations? As I pointed out below, that's the secret. The students stayed busy teaching themselves, through the magic of memorization. What joy (for the teacher)! What simplicity!

Which is one of several reasons I will be proposing that homeschoolers rediscover and re-adopt the old "recitation" method -- because we are the modern-day equivalent of the one-room multi-graded classroom. I think this is why so many homeschool moms run into trouble -- we are using graded-classroom teaching methods, which means teaching all the time (because this is all we know), in a multi-graded classroom. Oy oy oy! It didn't work for Mrs. Pioneer Schoolmarm, and it doesn't work so well for us, either. Ask me how I know. More -- much more -- on this at a later time.

So. Anyway. Back to "learning lessons". That's my guess: that for a very long time in American schools and homes, learning meant pretty much one thing... it meant memorizing. If you understood what you memorized, so much the better.

Next blog: OK, then, so what exactly is a Recitation? What does it "look like"? I'll give you my thoughts on that question.

Ch. 1: TIME TO GET STARTED

Methods of Teaching in Country Schools, by G. Dallas Lind; p. 60.

I started reading old books about teaching a few years ago. By old books, I mean from the 1800's. I was desperately searching for answers. I'd been homeschooling my own children for almost 20 years by this time, at times juggling up to six children's schoolwork in six different grades, and I had always looked back in awe at the old schoolmarm of yesteryear. I was stretched so thin, and I had one burning question, which I was hoping these books could answer for me -- for G-d's sake, how did she DO it? How did a young woman (Little House on the Prairie author, and real-life schoolteacher, Laura Ingalls Wilder, started teaching at 16; this was not an unusually young age to start teaching at that time) -- how did a young woman (or man) educate a room full of up to 60 students at a time (click on the floorplan for a one-room schoolhouse above to enlarge, and take note of item #11 at the bottom) of every grade, with no help, and have them graduate from the eighth grade with a better education than our modern-day high school (dare I say university?) graduates?

I think I found the answer in those old books. It's so simple it's almost a let-down. But in simplicity is genius. Here's what I found.
Apart from these schoolteachers possessing some pretty extraordinary class management skills, which we'll get into later, the real secret to how they got it all done - schedule-wise, at least -, I was surprised to find out, is that they spent no more than 10 to 15 minutes with each class in each subject. I wondered, then, how they were able to teach to the extent needed to produce such qualified scholars upon graduation. I mean, ten minutes per day per subject? Therein lay the second secret I discovered. The more I read, the more I found that if there is one word that differentiates 19th century education from 20th and 21st century education, that word would be MEMORIZATION. This is what made the difference -- the students basically used their time to teach themselves! That's right. Although a reform movement stressing understanding over rote memorization started taking hold in the 1830's, most schools, at least most rural schools, were still relying on strict, word-for-word memorization as the main teaching strategy, well into the latter years of the 19th century.

Rote memorization???? Yes, indeed. In fact, it was quite common for the student to be assigned a certain amount of paragraphs in a particular textbook (said paragraphs often being helpfully numbered in the book for easy reference) to sit quietly and memorize at his seat during a prescribed time scheduled for that particular study, and then be called forward with the others of the same grade (or more accurately, with the others in that same book, since a child might be in a 3rd grade arithmetic book, a 4th grade reader, and a 2nd grade speller) for the time called the Recitation. It was called the Recitation, because that's exactly what the students did -- they recited what they had memorized. Verbatim. They were either simply requested to, "Recite, please", or they were asked questions by the teacher, the answers to which were not to be deduced, or explained, or guessed at, but simply, recited. From memory.

It was sometimes the case, I've read, that the child did not fully understand what whatever it was that he was reciting meant. Although most teachers did try to ascertain how much was understood, and teach/explain that which was not, it was also the case that a lack of understanding on the part of the student was not cause for as great alarm back then as it would be to us today. Not because it didn't matter whether students understood their work, but rather, because although a student might not fully grasp the meaning of what he was reciting now, it was pretty much taken for granted that when the time was right, he would. I like to compare it to teaching a two-year old to recite the ABC's. Why do this, when a two-year old is utterly incapable of understanding what it all means? We do it because when he begins to read, he has the alphabet, all comfortably memorized and filed away, to pull out of his mind's filing cabinet, ready to be used to build his phonics work upon. He most certainly did not understand what he was saying at two, but now at six, he does. And he doesn't have to waste time memorizing it now that he needs it -- that was taken care of earlier, and his time is now freed up to just go ahead and put it all to use. Well, same idea -- memorized history or geography factoid now, useful information later.

Well, that's all I've time for now. I will add a little more in the next few days. I'll leave it for now at that the key to a good pioneer education, was the ability to memorize and recite at will. Till next time!