Teaching Children to Love Poetry, Part 3: The Motivation to Memorize
“With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS."
Last year, I taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to my 6th grade class. And, because I typically require my students to memorize all the poems we study, a chuckle spread through the classroom when we got to the end of it and someone jokingly asked, “Are you going to make us memorize this, Mrs. Steele?”
If you are familiar with ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ then you know why this was funny. If you’re not, you should stop reading this and go read that. (Here is a link to read it for free.)
I assured my students that I wouldn’t ask them to memorize it.
Timidly, one of my students asked, “…But can we try to memorize it if we want to?”
”Oh, absolutely!” I cried, “And if you succeed I will be very jealous because it is a dream of mine to memorize the whole thing someday.”
The student asked for a deadline. I told him he could have until I got back from maternity leave (approximately five months from the date of that lesson).
And then, I admit, I totally forgot about this conversation.
Fast forward to five months later. It was my first day back after having a baby, I was excited to start reading The Count of Monte Cristo with my 6th graders, and no part of me was thinking about that bright-eyed mariner, or whether anybody tried to memorize his tale. We read the first chapter of The Count, and as I was about to leave the room, that same student approached me and asked, “When can I recite the poem?”
”Which poem?” I asked, puzzled.
”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” he replied quietly.
”Oh my gosh,” I whispered, as the memory of our conversation five months prior came back to me. “The whole thing?”
”Yes,” he said, with the most adorable grin.
And he wasn’t kidding. Later that week, he came to my classroom after school and dramatically recited all 4,000 words of it without making a single mistake.
Children love memorizing poetry, and it is such a valuable pursuit for them. But, there isn’t a sneaky trick that unlocks their ability to see and pursue that value—it is a process. Children must be taught to see the beauty of the poem, then be shown how to memorize it, and, most importantly, they must perform it.
The first step in this process, teaching a beautiful poem, can be done using the process I outlined in part one of this series. I give my students their first poetry lesson on day one of 2nd grade, and then I ask them to memorize it. I start them off on a short poem, like ‘Joys’ by J.R. Lowell, and throughout the school year I increase the length of their poetry memorization assignments.
By the time they enter 4th grade, they are ready to memorize quite lengthy poems, and they love it. I start each year by teaching my students how to memorize things, and I make it fun. I also give them more than enough time to memorize it. We do short exercises in class, too, like repeating after me many, many times, or playing “poetry popcorn” where the students take turns saying lines of the poem as I draw popsicle sticks with their names written on them.
The most wonderful step in the process, however, is the actual recitation. The glow of pride that exudes from a student who has worked hard to memorize a poem and recites it flawlessly is a beautiful thing. And, this is where the motivation for more happens—they chase that feeling time and time again, and their desire for it increases every time they make a new connection to a poem they have memorized.
The key here is making it a low-stakes experience—I make sure the other students are busy with some task while each child comes up to the front of the class to recite, and I have a copy of the poem with me so they can ask me what comes next at any time. This way nobody is staring at them, and they know I’m there to help.
I used to make the students watch each poetry recitation, and I would make red marks on my copy of the poem wherever a student made a mistake. But, this meant that everybody heard the same poem that they had already been studying sixteen times in a row, it stressed them out, and I found that it really killed the joy and motivation of the students. So, I stopped. Once I lightened up, the kids started loving the recitation days, they made fewer mistakes, and they actually started remembering the poems for longer—even referencing them during discussions more frequently.
Observing their reactions to different approaches is also how I learned that students were more motivated by memorizing long poems in their entirety—the longer the better.
Several years ago, I decided to teach ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ by Walt Whitman to my 4th grade class, as it goes well with a book we read. That class was ambitious, so I decided they were perfect for a poetry experiment. I gave them a month to memorize the whole poem (it is about 200 words long), and I worked with them on it for a couple minutes each day. About two weeks later, several students started asking me if they could recite the poem early, because they were ready. I allowed this, and three days before the deadline, every student in the class had already recited the poem, and each of them performed it without making a single mistake.
There were two boys in that class who would walk down to the parking lot together after school every day, and for the rest of the school year, once or twice per week, I would hear their tandem recitation of ‘O Captain! My Captain!‘ echoing through the hallways of the school at the end of the day.
So, my experiment was a success, but I wasn’t to know how successful it was until I introduced the next poem to that class—’Stars’ by Emily Bronte (300 words). Before we even started talking about the poem, students were eagerly asking if I could please, please, please require them to memorize the whole thing.
These students, once armed with a knowledge of the power of poetry, and how it increases exponentially once it is memorized, began memorizing poetry even when it was not required of them. The following year, eight students from that class voluntarily memorized Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ (977 words) … and one of them went on to become the 6th grader you read about here, who memorized ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ All of those students will remember these gems forever—the language, the drama, the beauty—all of it is theirs to keep for the rest of their lives.
Poetry contains the heights of human joy, the depths of our sorrows, and every shade in between, distilled into language so sincere, so lovingly chosen, that nothing compares to the power of being able to summon it to your lips at will. Memorizing poetry is one of the best ways to bring beauty into your heart, and a thing of beauty is a joy forever.