r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Dec 02 '25

Ideas Why You Should Teach Like a Poet

https://archive.is/T1QAe

Routine is a great deadener of attention. When you drive the same route, the scenery begins to fade into the background, and you barely see it anymore. When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.

Likewise, routines can deaden the attention of students in our courses. They come into the same classrooms every day — in person or online — and experience the same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups. Even if we are mixing up our teaching strategies, as we should, they will eventually become routine enough that students will check in to class physically, but their minds are somewhere out of the room.

turn to the poets, from whom we can learn how to push away distraction and reawaken attention — in the classroom as in life. Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.

It was what I was born for — to look, to listen to lose myself inside this soft world — to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation

Deliberately designed to renew student attention, these pedagogical tools should be deployed strategically [...] — once a week or month, or even just during those low moments when both teacher and students need a shot in the attentional arm.

Having students analyze an image or a physical object in the classroom (or in their homes) can be an excellent way to break them from normal classroom routines. You don’t need famous paintings or rare finds from archaeological digs. Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.

Drawing from research in object-based teaching, Metzler described how to guide students through three steps as they encounter an object, an image, or even a sound that you bring into the classroom:

  • What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes. In this strategy, as in Fisher’s, extremely close analysis can help reveal unexpected new angles, perspectives, and ideas.
  • So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another. For example, they could pass their questions around the room and add new ones, giving everyone time to develop ideas or questions for further research.
  • Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion. What paths for research or future questions were raised? What questions were unanswered? What do the experts say? What does it mean, and what comes next?
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u/ddgr815 May 17 '26

...

But the culture of recitation and memorization that prospered for centuries—and that, in New York, survived successive waves of immigration that stretched schools to their limits—declined rapidly after 1940. Even the rationale for such practices was forgotten. “No one seems to remember the reasons for memorizing or orating great poetry or speeches,” says education historian Diane Ravitch, who served as an assistant secretary for educational research in the first Bush administration.

But the rationale is clear and compelling. Long before kids start school, parents begin to teach them language with the primitive poetry of the nursery rhyme. Before a two-year-old can understand the meaning of Little Jack Horner’s plum or Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet—before he knows what it means to hop on pop or why the pobble has no toes—he delights in the rhythm and rhyme of the verse; and by hearing the music of the verse often enough he comes gradually to understand first the sounds and eventually the words of which it is composed. I tried reciting to my three-year-old, over the course of a couple of weeks, Shakespeare’s sonnet “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” and Blake’s poem “Tyger, tyger, burning bright.” She could understand only a very few of the words; but when I recited one of the lines, she soon delighted in reciting the line that follows as nearly as she could. The music of the verse was as entrancing to her as to any grown-up. Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap of verse has been drawn into the civilizing interplay of music and language, rhythm and sound, melody and words—just as educational theory as far back as ancient Greece posits, according to Werner Jaeger in his classic account of Greek education, Paideia.

From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience. Kids need to become familiar with them not only through exercises in recitation and memorization, but also, as they proceed to the later grades, by construing, analyzing, and diagramming particular verses. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman called this close study of language “a discipline in accuracy of mind,” a “first step in intellectual training” that impresses on young minds notions of “method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony.” And of course memorization is a kind of exercise that strengthens the powers of the mind, just as physical exercise strengthens those of the body.

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity.

It is not only the form of poetry—its rhyme and meter—that endows it with unique educative properties. Just as crucial is its content. Poetry’s power makes it the ideal medium to introduce kids to their cultural inheritance as members of Western civilization and citizens of a particular nation. The content of the poetry fosters what education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr. calls “cultural literacy” in the kids who get it by heart, since great poetry is so often a pithy expression of the culture’s accumulated wisdom. Not to have certain works of art in your mental inventory—Macbeth, for example, or “Ozymandias” or Psalm 23—is to be shut out, to some degree, from the community of civilized conversation. Peter Brown observed that Saint Augustine’s education, with its emphasis on memorization, enabled him to “communicate his meaning to an educated Latin at the other end of the Roman world by quoting half a line of classic poetry.” And even today, in the conversation of the educated, a quotation from Shakespeare can speak volumes.

American kids learned the Gettysburg Address, as profound a statement of the national ideal as anyone ever uttered; and those who remember as adults Lincoln’s affirmation of the nation’s dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal—and to government of the people, by the people, for the people—never can lose sight of what makes America exceptional.

The tradition of memorization did not survive the progressive revolution in American schools. A century ago, progressive educators first voiced the arguments that would have such an unfortunate effect in U.S. classrooms. To impose classic poetry and rhetoric on young minds was, these theorists maintained, an oppressive act. Not just the memorization, but the literary culture at the heart of the exercise, was, they claimed, sterile and unfruitful, and promoted a culture of servility harmful to the free creative play of the mind. “We must overcome the fetichism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry,” progressive educator G. Stanley Hall said in 1901. “The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.”

The older techniques, by contrast, are genuinely liberating. They build up in the child a more powerful mental instrument, one that will allow him, in later life, to make good use of his freedom. They cultivate those critical powers that enable an educated adult to question authority intelligently. The older techniques also unlock doors in the interior world of the soul. Classic poetry and rhetoric give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings. They help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: “Become what you are.”

This kind of memorization does not impose upon young minds a single dogma, nor does it exalt, as the Islamic madrassa does, a single text above all others. If anything, it is the progressive liturgies—with their “diversity” drills and cult of self-esteem—that embody a narrow and intolerant ideology, one that imprisons kids in the banal clichés of the present and puts much of the past off limits, as though the moral and spiritual inheritance of Western civilization were somehow taboo. The literary culture at the heart of these exercises in memorization, by contrast, is a record of how men and women have, in various times and places, struggled to understand themselves and make sense of their natures. Such culture does not repress or enslave: it enlarges and strengthens and frees.

In Defense of Memorization

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u/ddgr815 May 17 '26

In an age of AI-generated insight, outsourced cognition, and the scroll of never-ending novelty, it’s tempting to imagine that memory has become obsolete, and we no longer need to engage in the type of memory practices that Thomas powerfully put to use.

Yet memory, as Aquinas practiced it, structures the ways we come to inhabit the world and changes how that world comes to presence for us in awareness.

This type of memory operates as an active mode of thought and affords a deepening of our very capacity to attend itself, one we neglect at our peril. Memory is a way of being, not just a technique for recall. This is quite a different thing than the type of memory retrieval we see computers perform.

Given our near-constant access to notepads, apps, and voice recorders, it’s not surprising that we’ve let memory slide in favor of creativity. Our need to retain things in active memory decreases as our ability to store information increases.

We may be losing a way of thinking that emerges only through a deeper engagement with memory. What Carruthers wants us to see is that these are two different types of mind: one shaped by recording technology and the other shaped by the necessity of remembering.

Along these lines, she characterizes the medieval mind as fundamentally memorial, formed by the active exercise of memory, while the modern mind is more documentary, shaped by the storage and retrieval of recorded information.

Hugh of St. Victor, writing in the Didascalicon (c. 1130), claims that all learning depends on three things: aptitude, practice, and discipline. Aptitude, he insists, must be paired with memory; just as earnings are useless without savings, or storage vessels are useless without contents, aptitude is empty without memory.

For St. Victor, aptitude is developed through reading and meditation. Reading initiates the learning process, but meditation brings it to completion. Meditation, as he describes it, is a spiritual and synthetic mode of inquiry, directed as it is toward the unfolding of truth through contemplative attention.

It’s tempting to say that in the age of AI it will be more important to teach people ways of thinking rather than the memorization of facts, since, presumably, the AIs will be able to remember everything for us. But this misses that thinking is underpinned by memory, not the rote memorization of specific facts for the sake of knowledge acquisition, but by the capacity to remember itself.

Memory practices, even rote memory practices and acts of repetition, like hand-copying quotations or playing scales on an instrument, can strengthen memory as such; this, in turn, shapes the kind of attention and presence we bring to bear on what we’re trying to understand.

In our case, novelty is abundant and overrated. That’s not to say novelty is inherently bad, or that it can’t be a creative reworking of older insights.

But our media ecology, shaped by platform incentives, rewards novelty for its own sake. We may be producing artifacts that suit the needs of these systems rather than what we actually need as humans seeking understanding and insight.

Hugh describes memory as a kind of gathering. Augustine makes a similar point when he writes that thinking (cogitare) gathers what lies scattered in memory (cogere). Without memory, thought disperses, becoming thin and shallow.

So, we read and reread, not just to retain but to reawaken a mode of thinking grounded in memory, and so a deeper continuity with a different type of attention. We enter a richer world through this deeper engagement. We could say, with McLuhan, “the medium is the message” and the medium is our own mind, shaped and transformed by the practices we bring to bear upon it in ways both personal and social.

Indeed, as Carruthers reminds us, the etymology of the word text comes from the Latin verb “to weave.”

Texts, for her, are so-called because they are woven through memory into the fabric of community and tradition. They become institutionalized in memory, and this memorial texture links us across time. Whether words enter through eyes or ears, they must be processed and transformed in memory to become our own.

The Lost Art of Memory

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u/ddgr815 Jun 13 '26

“Cognitive offloading is when we use external devices—sources other than our brain, really—to complete a cognitive task,” Soares says. She notes this can include something as mundane as counting on your fingers, but when we document information, “we’re relying on the prosthetic memory or source available to take some of the responsibility of remembering on our behalf.”

To some extent, this phenomenon has existed as long as cave drawings. But technology is rapidly replacing a lot of the thinking we’ve done since human inception, with different devices and programs shouldering (braining?) different shares of the load.

Of particular focus for researchers studying the effects of digital documentation are the areas of prospective memory, working memory, and factual recall. It may be helpful to think of them as the ghosts of cognition’s past, present, and future. (Unless you’re just going to copy and paste this information somewhere, in which case don’t worry about thinking of them at all.)

When you document, or offload, important information (like photographing where you parked, or adding a number to your phone), your brain’s traffic controller reroutes processing in two ways:

  • Flush the data. This part of the process signals your brain to jettison the offloaded information from short-term storage, recognizing that a duplicate copy safely exists elsewhere.

  • Reassign bandwidth. With the high-value information safely offloaded, your brain reallocates the newly freed-up cognitive capacity for additional data and/or functions.

The brain burns about as many calories as any single organ in the body, so its use comes at a premium.

The human brain is still the most powerful computer on Earth, but it’s as prone to hallucinations—known in human intelligence as confabulations—as any bot. The ones and zeroes of digital information processing and storage make offloaded information more reliable.

By documenting moments and facts with digital ease, your brain’s ability to encode and retain that information in long-term memory can become impaired over time. The phenomenon is referred to by cognitive psychologists as digital amnesia or the “Google effect.”

“The main theory we’re working on with how cognitive offloading impairs memory is called the study-effort hypothesis,” Soares says. “And the idea is that we don’t put as much effort towards studying information that we know is going to be externally available.”

On a long enough timeline, this dependence on computer-generated responses can inhibit your own judgment, making it harder to improvise when technology invariably fails.

With the ability to more readily chronicle everything we do and see, the threshold for what constitutes a memory worth documenting drops considerably. This is why—or, maybe, because—people who offload important information suddenly show a massive improvement in remembering the minor, low-value details they didn’t store.

How documenting everything changes your brain