By John Heaton, Headmaster ||
The year 1969 was one for the record books. While riots over Vietnam and other social issues raged, it was also the year of Apollo 11 and the first moon landing. It was the year that etched the storied names of Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins in the social imagination. Additionally, it was the same year I completed first grade.
My grade-school education was notable in many respects. It was presided over by Esteleen Froelich (pronounced FROI lick), a tall, slight woman with tight curls around her head in three rows and very small round glasses. She was unbelievably strict to the point of being rigid, and if I were to stereotype her, I would classify her as the oldest relic of a 19th century “old school” approach to education. Which is to say that in many ways she was “classical” before our movement was reinvented. In one sense she was behind the times, and strangely in another, way ahead of her time. In all respects, eccentric.
One of the outstanding pedagogies she exploited was that of memory and repetition. We memorized everything from poetry to presidents (with dates of office), to states and capitals (with state flowers and animals). We also memorized the Bible.
Starting in the first grade, students were given a typewritten list of Scripture references on one page and by Thanksgiving were memorizing eight verses a week. This increased to ten in second grade going forward. Memorization for nonreaders required parental cooperation, which of course, Mrs. Froelich insisted upon and enforced. Once up and reading, children were on their own.
The regimen proceeded this way. Each Wednesday after Assembly, students were assigned ten new verses for the week. Each was expected to recite those verses individually to the teacher, quietly standing at her desk at the back of the room. Thursdays and Fridays were used as memorization days in which we were given time each morning to study. We were also required to copy the verses from the text in our best penmanship, turning that assignment in by each Friday afternoon. Mondays and Tuesdays were practice days in which we orally rehearsed our passages in unison in our classrooms. Each Wednesday was recitation day at Assembly. Students were grouped into sections—first grade by itself, then second and third, fourth through sixth, seventh through ninth, and finally tenth through twelfth.
We proceeded by section in a carefully choreographed cohort, with almost military precision, filing in a line to our places before the student body. It wasn’t just a line; it was always two lines in which the tallest students were in the middle with the shortest ones at the ends, creating a “bell curve” look to the arrangement. It took more than a little practice during the month of September to arrange the order and memorize our places. Once that was accomplished however, we could file forward, find our places no matter the order in which we were sitting—all in a matter of seconds. It was impressive indeed, and parents who witnessed the dance often gasped audibly at the array. After Wednesday chapel, we would receive the next ten verses, and the system repeated itself.
And the lists! Mrs. Froelich had crafted her own selections and grouped them into lists to which she assigned names. There was the “Promises” list. Think: Hebrews 13:5; John 14:1-6, etc. (Do you need to look them up?) There was the “Jewels” list; think Proverbs 15:1-3; James 4:7-8. There was the “Psalms” list, which you can guess included nothing but Psalms, beginning with Psalm 1 and proceeding through most of the Psalter. This repeated each week for thirty-six weeks of school—for twelve years. The highlight, of course, was the memorization of Psalm 119—all 176 verses—including the Hebrew alphabetic divisions. A $100 cash prize was offered to the 8th grader who could memorize it, stand in front of the entire student body by oneself, and recite the whole thing word-perfect. I tried, but Janet Engler beat me to it; it took her a mere twenty minutes to recite it.
By ninth grade we ran out of her lists, so Mrs. Froelich just moved us into whole books: Jonah, 1 Peter, James, 1 John, and so on. It wasn’t really that hard. By the time I reached the fifth grade, I could memorize the ten assigned verses in under fifteen minutes, recite them to Mrs. Sanders at the back of the room, and get on with the copying. And did I mention that all of this was done in the King James Version? It is arguably the most beautiful translation in the English language.
By the time I graduated, the math indicates that we each memorized more than 4,000 verses of holy writ, although we weren’t counting, and we didn’t think it strange. It’s just what we did. Looking back, it was exceptional in an odd way, but it demonstrated Mrs. Froelich’s educational values, and it demonstrated the capability of the average student’s mental powers. It profoundly formed the leaf mold of my mind.
You’ve probably noticed by now that a similar regimen exists at New Covenant. That is to say, we utilize repetition and memorization, both of which have fallen into disuse by modern educators. Here we continue to capitalize on the young child’s strong ability to absorb vast amounts of information, the degree to which is often underestimated by educators and unknown to parents. With a short poem, the periodic table, or the history timeline, “I can’t” is not an acceptable response from children. Yes, they can; and yes, they do.
As easily as young children can learn “Eeney-meeney-miney-moe” they can learn “amo, amas, amat,” a standard Latin verb conjugation. They can do it effortlessly and in class together. We don’t need to send it home for homework —it’s one of the tools of education that drives how school is done during the day. Repetition and memorization are a classic addition to our toolbox, and essential to a full pedagogy.
