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Suppose you are memorizing "Psalm of Life" to be recited a month from to-day, and that you require thirty repetitions of the poem to learn it. Shall you make these thirty repetitions at one sitting? Or shall you distribute them among several sittings? In general, it is better to spread the repetitions over a period of time. The question then arises, what is the most effective distribution?
Thus they finished their large breakfast, and hastened to their notes for a last good bout at memorizing Epicharmos of Kos and his various brethren. The appointed hour found them crossing the college yard toward a door inside which Philosophy 4 awaited them: three hours of written examination!
It does not strengthen or improve the habit of memorizing, which should always be based upon close attention, and a logical method of classifying, associating, and analyzing facts or ideas. Lord Bacon, more than two centuries ago, wisely characterized mnemonic systems as "barren and useless."
Since the brain pattern requires time to "set," it is important that after the first impression you refrain from introducing anything immediately into the mind that might disturb it. After you have impressed the poem you are memorizing, do not immediately follow it by another poem. Let the brain rest for three or four minutes until after the first impressions have had a chance to "set."
This is, indeed, a simple and an excellent theme. "We first see the child led about upon the wide and withered common of knowledge, with the same sort of meagre fodder for all; we see it trained in mechanical memorizing, in barren knowledge concerning things and forms that are dead and gone; in ignorance concerning the life that is, in contempt for it, and in the consciousness of its privileged position, by dint of its possession of this doubtful culture.
On the other hand, no one should, because he has a good faculty for time and tune and the memorizing of airs, conclude that he is an artist. The one faculty may exist altogether apart from the capacity for the highest art.
As it was, their teacher's haste to have it learned, amounted to a direct advocacy of the principle of cramming; for they were attempting to memorize through force rather than through association of ideas. One reason older students practice cramming to such an extent is that they have never been fully taught a better method; the schools have never fully stood for a better method of memorizing.
And this not because young people are lazy and disobedient, but because they are practically taught to stop there by their teachers. They tell the truth when, recalling practice, they almost universally declare that studying is mainly memorizing; and Helen Keller's complaint that she had to study so much that she did not have time to think, expresses a very common experience.
The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing, and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much despised.
The habit of memorizing facts in this disconnected way is common among adults as well as children, and as a remedy against it the student should form the habit of frequently asking himself the question, "With what am I associating this fact or idea?"
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