States and Capitals

Bob-O-Rama Junior came home today and announced that he had to memorize the states and their capitals for Geography Class.

My blood froze.

The tot had my total and utter pity.

The states/capitals thing was the very bane of my existence as a youth. There were few parts of school I have ever hated more and there was no almost no part of my "formal" education that I found more painful or more cumbersome, and probably no part of my education has been more useless to me than memorizing which capital went with which state.

I'm a firm believer that knowledge--almost any knowledge--is good in and of itself. More than most people I believe that knowing things--knowing them just for their own sake--is good by itself. But in this paragraph's first sentence, I said "almost," and I seriously mean that there are exceptions.

Also, there is a very decided difference between "knowing" something and memorizing it. I know Shakespeare's Cymbeline, but I can only quote a few lines from memory. Still, I know what it's about, what it says, I can find any line in it that I want, and if I should ever be lucky enough to play in it, I will then memorize it.

Now Hamlet I do have memorized, but that was a conscious choice for my own pleasure.

But back to states and capitals...

It's funny that such an arcane part of the curriculum is still included in school curriculum. They've killed Latin, Fine Art, Theoretical Math, Literary Masterpieces, Music Appreciation, and "Western Civilization" but my kids still pursue idiocy like states and capitals and sentence diagramming.

Ah yes, now there's one...sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming might be the measure of just how useless can something be and still remain in curriculum. For the record, I was a crackerjack sentence diagrammer. I could do it in my sleep. Diagramming was fun--it was like working a puzzle--and I learned absolutely nothing from it. Ever.

In fact, when I was a high school teacher, before I would start the very short unit on diagramming (and unlike many teachers, I never spent an entire year diagramming sentences), I would tell the students that the exercise, if learned, was a pleasant diversion, but functionally worthless and would have no real application in their professional lives (unless they also made the mistake of becoming English teachers). In fact I would tell the pupils that if any employer EVER asked them about their sentence diagramming skills prior to hiring them, that they didn't need that job anyway.

Several of those students have written me over the years and congratulated me on that wisdom. One or two told me they appreciated the advice from a more generalized standpoint. These beings had discovered several things that no one uninvolved in teaching ever needed to know, including the value of pi more than two places, the address of the White House, the year the Battle of Sedan was fought, or especially what city was the capital of any state besides their own might be.

Though no one had ever asked them if they could diagram a sentence, they had learned the difference between "nice to know" and "need to know."

When people would tell me I was wrong to talk down sentence diagramming because it was a crucial to learning to write it always confused me. To learn to write, you write. It's like learning to play guitar, you might get some instruction, but you will never actually learn to play guitar unless you pick one up and seriously work at it. Sentence diagramming is exactly the same thing. You do not learn to write or speak better from diagramming, you only learn to diagram. You learn to write--as I say--by practicing your writing.

I want to return to that "nice to know"/"need to know" continuum. I used to be fond of saying that all knowledge breaks into one of those two categories, but I suddenly find myself in possession of a third category: "Nice to know but why bother because it's in a reference book anyway?" (NTKBWBBIIARBA?")

You see, in the end, I don't really believe there is such a thing as "nice to know." I think that under the proper circumstances, every piece of information in the universe could be intensely useful. On some level, for some person, virtually everything is "need to know." Also, most acquired knowledge can form a pattern that qualifies as "beautiful"--if you can just get enough of it to see how everything fits together. But I also understand teaching well enough to understand the concept of "busy work." You know about busy work, that's what a poorly prepared (possibly hung-over) teacher hands out when they can't bare to face your little darlings on a given day. Busy work generally revolves around rote memorization of trivial material that is easily available in a reference book, but has no practical innate usage of its own or contains no inner beauty.

I can still quote from memory dozens of poems and hundreds of songs, and these quotes generally bring some happiness to me (that's why I quote them to myself), this happiness is a practical by-product of that rote information. But I never set around and drive pleasure from the fact that the capital of Wyoming is Cheyenne.

Picture this: "Ooooooooh baby! Wyoming...Cheyenne...YEAH! POW!"

Doesn't work for you either, does it?

I've been to all fifty state capitals, D.C., and San Juan, so I have feelings about those places...mostly the feelings I have are that though I generally like at least something about nearly every state in the union, generally the worst city in any given state is the capital. And I never needed to know I was going to the state's capital for my job...it never applied to my reality except in D.C. where Government is somewhat more elemental.

So what am I telling you? Simple: you can't trust a child to know the difference between "Need to know" (applicable knowledge) and "Nice to know" (aesthetically pleasing knowledge), so anything the teacher forces on them becomes "need to know." This power of determining what information is crucial for memorization should not be abused or confused with busy work/pointless rote memorization.

NOTE: I don't think most adults understand the difference any more either, but with only a very few exceptions any non-aesthetic, abstruse information readily available in a reference book should not be taught for memorization when it does not apply to a learner's real-world vocational needs.

An astrophysicist might need to know the value of pi to many figures...two is enough at the pre-college age level, and probably for most terrestrial engineering functions. Everyone needs to know the capital of their own state, for other states they need to know the proper reference materials.

What I'm against is not the teaching of arcane information (as I say, I think on some level, it's all useful) my gripe is against busy work and abstract memorization.

And while we're talking relevance, if we must exclude Latin, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Higher Math, and Western History from the schools because they are "irrelevant," well, I can't think of anything less immediately relevant than knowing that the capital of Missouri is Jefferson City--unless I happen to live in Missouri.

And really, isn't memorizing the states and capitals just some of that Depression-era crap that should (but hasn't) been jettisoned with nonsense like "perfect attendance awards?"

Now excuse me...I'm tripping on the sudden memory that the capital of California is Sacramento....Oh Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!