Roger O Green

Rote memorization

87 years ago…

I’ve been musing on rote memorization. One reason is a column in the Boston Globe, The blessing of ‘rote’ memory by Jeff Jacoby. The subtitle: “Memorization for its own sake has long been unfashionable. It shouldn’t be.”

Jacoby notes: “There was a time when memorization was a standard feature of American schooling. In 1927, New York City’s board of education directed grade school teachers to teach poetry to pupils, with particular emphasis on the use of rhythm, diction, and imagery.”

Of course, “it isn’t only literature that can be memorized. The elements of the periodic table, the names and locations of the 50 states, the 46 US presidents, the first 100 digits of pi, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, all the best picture Oscar winners — the list is literally endless…

“Everyone memorizes some things — the multiplication tables, their Social Security number, song lyrics, the Wi-Fi password, family members’ birthdays — but memorization for its own sake has long since gone out of favor.” I was not specifically aware of that trend.

Lowest form?

“Writing in The American Scholar more than 40 years ago, the late Clara Claiborne Park, a professor of English at Williams College, commented on the disdain with which professional educators dismissed learning material by heart as mere ‘rote memory.’ She quoted one college president who sneeringly called memorization ‘the lowest form of human intellectual activity.'”

Jacoby pushes back. “But there is nothing ‘low’ about mastering a block of information so effectively that you can surface it at will… You don’t have to be a ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant to relish having instant recall of thick slices of knowledge. Memorization takes work, but there is joy in the accumulation of knowledge that requires no googling.”

I’ve actually gotten pushback in this blog about this in the past. Why remember it when you can just look it up? To which I’ve indicated the joy – yes, that’s the word – of knowing stuff.

The Word

When I used to attend a Friday Night Bible Club for several years, roughly from fourth through tenth grade, Pat, the woman running it, suggested that we should try to memorize Bible verses. To this day, I still remember Psalm 119:11, in the King James Version, of course. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.”

Memorization was also the recommendation at her church, Primitive Methodist in Johnson City, coincidentally very close to where my parents would move after I went to college. I remember one of the PM teens selected John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” It wasn’t explicitly stated, but I have long thought that this process was suggested in case the Communists took over the country and took all of our Bibles.

Music allowed me to cheat somewhat. Because I know the anthem God So Loved the World, I can cite John 3:17. “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

A college friend of mine surprisingly got into a brief but intense Christian phase. They recommended that I memorize all of the books of the Bible, and I dutifully did so.

Now? Well, I can get through the Pentateuch, then Joshua Judges Ruth, which, not incidentally, is the title of a Lyle Lovett CD that I own. Then the twofer history books, which are in reverse alpha order: 1st and 2nd Samuel, Kings, Chronicles. The history section ends with EastNortheast; I mean Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and… a couple more. The five major prophets, then I totally fall apart over the 12 minor prophets. I’m better with the New Testament, but some of the epistles – where IS Philemon? -are a bit shaky.

Lousy memory

I did really well with math tables. I know the Social Security numbers of my wife and daughter. And I used to remember all the area codes, and the geography they represented when the codes had a zero or one in the middle. Also, I’m rather good with birthdays.

But rote memorization of words was/is tougher. I struggled with the Emancipation Proclamation, which is only two minutes long. I could never be a leading actor because I couldn’t absorb the lines. In high school, I was the Fire Chief in Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t remember some soliloquy, so someone put it on a scroll, which I took out and read, then flung towards the audience.

Yet I DO know the Presidents, which helped on JEOPARDY; the order of Beatles album releases (US AND UK), and most of the MLB players who hit more than 500 home runs.

The one thing I actively tried to instill into my child’s brain was the names of the states. Not exactly in alphabetical order, but the four A states, the three C states et al.

Recently, Kelly thanked his 7th grade English teacher for forcing his class to memorize a particular poem that he learned to hate, but since…

Sometimes it works out

The G.I. Bill Restoration Act

This is one of those Day In The Life posts I’m calling Sometimes it works out. It is about April 26, 2022, which started with Wordle in 3 (HEIST).

My Bible guys have been meeting remotely since the start of the pandemic. Given the demographics – I’m the youngest of the group – I’m guessing that’s the way it’ll remain. One of the seven was traveling, one had an appointment. Another had trouble getting on ZOOM. Yet we persevere.

One of the readings was 1 Corinthians 15, which is a long chapter. Very familiar. No. 46 of Handel’s Messiah is Since by man came death, from verses 21 and 22. Then No. 47 through 51 show up in verses 51 to 57, starting with Behold, I shew you a mystery.

This led to a question, Who selected the libretto? I knew it wasn’t Handel but forgot it was Charles Jennens, “an English aristocrat who collaborated with Handel on several other oratorios.”

Lost money

While looking for my bus pass – which turned out to be in the wrong part of my wallet from its usual place – I found a stale-dated check for $18.71 on my dresser. If it had been a larger amount, I probably would have remembered to look for it. What it was doing on my dresser, as opposed to my wallet or my mail drawer, I don’t know.

The weird thing is that I can remember the amount without looking again because it is the second calendar year of the Franco-Prussian War, although the event actually lasted less than 12 months. Why I couldn’t use Mrs. O’Leary’s cow as a device… the mind does what it does.

The talk

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library have just restarted their weekly book review/book talk. A hole in the schedule developed and I volunteered to talk about The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which I talked about at church adult ed ZOOM a year ago.

I was going to use the 17-minute video Segregated by Design, narrated by Rothstein, but I couldn’t get the sound to work; nor could three library techies.

So I vamped a bit before abandoning the possibility of the video, and talked about The G.I. Bill Restoration Act, “recently introduced in the House of Representatives. This legislation would give financial benefits to descendants and spouses of Black veterans who fought in WWII, but were excluded from aid outlined in the original G.I. Bill.”

This led to conversations about my father, who never lived in a house of his own until 1972, and made me wonder whether he had tried to utilize the original G.I. Bill. Over a million black World War II vets were denied from using it. This led to my sharing a story of my father’s experiences in Germany. I found I LIKED talking about my dad.

Oh, I left the book at the library, but I got it back the following week.

Social Security

I went to the Social Security office. My wife is working on financial stuff for my daughter’s college and needs how much I received from Social Security in 2020. The amount I got in automatic deposits I know, but the amount paid for Part B Medicare IDK. The 2021 breakdown is on the Social Security page, but not the year before.

After getting the info from the agent, I asked about money owed to my daughter for the three months between her 18th birthday and her high school graduation. The paperwork had been submitted in early February but rejected in March because she wasn’t in high school. Except that she WAS/IS. I had to appeal this before May 3.

The agent suggested that the agency hadn’t received the proper form from the high school, which I had put in the mail in February. But they looked on the computer for a few minutes. They said the info was indeed there but that the agency had not processed it for reasons unclear to me. I took the bus, only mildly confident that my daughter would get the payments in a timely manner.

There you go

That was a someone atypical Tuesday. Unrelated, as I wrote to someone, “If you forget things on a daily basis, you should try remembering them weakly.”

Ancestry’s ethnicity inheritance

Mom is surely Parent 1

Ancestry.com recently sent me something called an ethnicity inheritance.

This is very interesting to me. “Ancestry® developed a technology called SideView™ to sort this out using DNA matches. Because a match is usually related to you through only one parent, your matches can help us ‘organize’ the DNA you share with them.

“SideView™ technology powers your ethnicity inheritance—the portions of each region you inherited from each parent. This enables us to provide your ethnicity inheritance without testing your parents (though we don’t know which parent is which).”

I would not be going out on a limb to assume Parent 1 is my mother. Her European ancestry is about half and the vast majority of my Irish heritage. Whereas my father is less than one-third European.

This could, of course, get into great debates, long litigated, about “What is race?” In America, race is less biology – designations such as quadroons and octoroons notwithstanding – but sociology. My mother, though quite fair, identified as a black woman, as did her parents and grandparents. Her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War in the 26th New York Infantry (Colored).

Those folks from Munster, County Cork I’m related to are more likely related to the Yates, Williams, and Archer families, rather than the Walker, Patterson, and Cone tribes.

Like many people, my family was told that on my mother’s side, we were indigenous North American. well, maybe a ways back. But my father’s side showed no measurable connection.

Redux?

I might have told this story before, in which case I’m telling it again. My parents could not rent an apartment in Binghamton, NY in the 1950s because they were perceived as a mixed couple, engaged in [horrors] miscegenation! For reasons, they couldn’t buy a place either. My parents finally bought a home in Johnson City; I lent them part of the downpayment since my college costs, in those days, were pretty cheap and I had a Regents scholarship.

I’m hoping the ethnicity inheritance discovery will somehow help me in my genealogical journey.

17 years a blogger

why do I note three score and ten?

If you told me I’d still be blogging 17 years later, and daily at that, I would have thought you were daft. I’m not much for daily rituals. Yet here we are.

Let me tell you a reason I DON’T do this. I have no sense that I know all the answers. Sure, I might know a few things. And thanks to the collective wisdom of you all, I know more about topics I didn’t think about than I could have imagined.

Let’s talk about the blog itself. When I started blogging on Blogger/Blogspot, I didn’t use any pictures/graphics. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to do so. Then, when I tried, it just didn’t work. They recommended a product called Picasa which I NEVER got to work, ever. Finally, I trial and error-ed my way to posting pictures.

Then I moved my blog over to WordPress. I had my fits and starts, more than I care to remember, frankly. But when I moved to another host, it came with ideas about plugins I should use, such as Yoast. Yoast offers all sorts of suggestions about SEO such as internal links (I do when I can), sentence length, passive voice, et al. I DO add subheadings, as recommended because I figure it makes the content easier to read. But I’m not locked into taking in all of the ideas.

The blogger fail

Oh, I should tell you a dumb thing I did with my blog this year. WordPress periodically releases updates. On March 11, it released version 5.9.2. Somehow – don’t ask me how ’cause I dunno – instead of updating, I overrode my whole blog! My home page was a Welcome To Your New Blog message. Fortunately, my provider, DreamHost was able to reinstate the backup in a couple of hours.

The best thing I’ve learned to do on the blog is to write when the inspiration hits. If I know what I want to write about for Labor Day, and it’s the middle of June, I’ll write about it before the summer solstice. It’s better than ignoring it than struggling with coming up with something at the end of August.

There are certain things I know that I’ll write about: holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. Also, I created a list of people who turned 70 in 2022. Why 70? It’s the three score and ten in the Bible, I suppose. But it’s also at a point when their accomplishments are clear. And picking a standardized birthday is easier than trying to remember if/when I wrote about them. This is why it’s Joe Cocker on May 20, 2014, and Cher on May 20, 2016.

It doesn’t mean I HAVE to write about them. In April, Steven Seagal (actor, the 10th), EJ Dionne (I watched him on the McNeil/Lehrer Report, 23rd), Bill Belichick (New England Patriot coach, the 16th), and Larry Elder (ran for governor of California, the 27th) all turned 70. I realized I didn’t have 300 words to write about them, and I try to write 300 words every day except my birthday. Or I just didn’t feel like wasting my energy on them, such as Harvey Weinstein (March 19).

The tunes

Ultimately, I blog because it’s useful for me. It’s a public forum to actually goad me to think about things that are confusing, irritating, uncomfortable. More often than not, I discover something new about a topic I thought I had mastered. If you like it, that’s a bonus.

Oh, yeah, the musical selections. Both involve a 17-y.o. male and 16 y.o female. I picked Sixteen Going On Seventeen from The Sound of Music, not for the song itself, but because, as the story progresses, the narrative becomes largely untrue. (He’s) Seventeen from the Meet The Supremes album is really corny, especially the bridge, but I enjoy early Motown.

Christine Baranski of Buffalo turns 70

Diane Lockhart

I’ve enjoyed the performances of Christine Baranski for many years. She was the best thing in the sitcom Cybill (1995-1998) as the sophisticated Maryann Thorpe. But I, and most people, know her as the smart and calculating Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife and its successor series, The Good Fight.

In a CBS Sunday Morning interview from January 2022, “Correspondent Mo Rocca asked Baranski, ‘Why do you think so often you’ve been cast as intellectual, sophisticated, high-status characters?’

“‘Because I’m sophisticated and intellectual!’ she laughed. ‘I don’t know! It makes me laugh, because when… people really look up… Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills, and where I come from?’

“Yes, Baranski is a proud Buffalonian, the daughter of Virginia and Lucien Baranski, who grew up steeped in her family’s Polish culture.”

That’s it. Even when she’s the snarky friend in Mamma Mia or the haughty reporter in Chicago – “Understandable! Understandable!” – she has that upstate New York rootedness. Her father died when she was eight. She attended Catholic school for 12 years, including an all-girls high school.

Mame

In Town and Country, she described sharing a room with her grandmother, “who had been an actress in the Polish theater. ‘I grew up with an Auntie Mame kind of personality. She was vivacious,’” and she passed on a love of the stage to her granddaughter…

“‘By the time I was 17 or 18, I was acting in not only plays in high school, but I got into this workshop and was doing street theater and performing with kids from all over the city. I was from a very insular kind of life. And suddenly, I was performing with Black kids and Jewish kids and it blew my world wide open.’

“Around that time, she read about the Juilliard School, and pinned the article to her wall, thinking: ‘This is where I want to go.'” But as she noted in the New Yorker, she was initially waitlisted. “I had my teeth capped and would do a series of syllable and ‘S’ exercises. Then I returned to New York for an audition and did nothing but pages of ‘S’ words, and they let me in. So I would say I got in by the skin of my teeth.”

More upper-crust

Nathan Lane spoke of his “the Birdcage” co-star, “She is a consummate actress and professional and a great deal of fun.” He only regrets that they didn’t have more scenes together in their new project The Gilded Age. Christine once again plays that upper-crust role, the moneyed Agnes Van Rhijn.

I think she is quite centered, not just because of her background. Probably it’s because she was a working stage performer before her television career started in her forties. Though she had been encouraged early on to change her name to something less ethnic, she never did.

Christine Baranski turns 70 on May 2.