Memorize This

I just got back from a hike in the Trexler Nature Preserve. We are so lucky that General Harry Trexler and his wife had no children. Instead of giving all of his holdings to his kids, he donated much of it to Allentown and Lehigh County.  This preserve is beautiful and managed well by the county.  On a trail today, I noticed that there are information plaques for the different types of trees in the Preserve.

I came across the plaque for the Eastern Hemlock and it immediately took me back to Slatington Junior High School!  Mrs. Hunsberger’s  8th grade English Class.   “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks .”  Yes, Evangeline by Longfellow. We had to memorize  a lot of this long, long poem. The line I quoted above is all I remember 53 years later.  So why did she have us memorize so much of it?  I guess to expose us to something different, to get us out of our comfort zone, and maybe to pique our interest in a new field of study.  I remember dreading the memorization back then, but today when I came across the hemlock tree it brought back a nice memory. I certainly am not worse off for having memorized Evangeline!

That got me thinking about all the things we are asked to memorize throughout our school career.  The planets, explorers, the periodic table of elements.  The names of the Great Lakes. The colors of the rainbow! Important dates of American History.  How to conjugate the verb ser in Spanish.  The order of operation of math problems.  The state capitals and the states’ largest export. The ten rules of punctuation (thank you, Mrs. Roeder). And last, but not least, the alphabet and multiplication tables. Those last two we use all the time.  Oh and there is so much more.

I guess what I am saying is that we have been asked, in our lives, to memorize a lot of stuff. Some of it stuck. Some of it didn’t. But it wasn’t all just for a test. It was to help us become well-rounded individuals that can survive, and thrive, in an ever increasingly complicated  and diverse world.

So I thank Mrs. Hunsberger and Henry Wadsworth Longellow for making my life a little more interesting, maybe not in that moment, but certainly in the long run!

I am going to try to find Evangeline this afternoon, but I am not going to memorize it!