MEMORY MATTERS: LEARNING TO REMEMBER

BY JENNY BLUE P’24, ’26

WWhen I was just out of college, a friend and I invented a game that would later bear a striking similarity to my current profession. The game did not cost a cent and had no material objective; its ingredients included books and memory and a touch of nostalgia. The rules were simple: A player would name a book title, the more distant in her past the better, and the other would respond with the first details that came to mind.

“Lord of the Flies,” I would say. My friend Maggie would reply, “An island. Glasses. Lots of boys. And a parachute?”

“How about Jane Eyre?” she would ask, and I would throw out, “A moor. A governess, rich people behaving badly. And a crazy person in an attic!” For 1984: “Rats in cages, eyes watching, thwarted love.”

We delighted in the variability of our memories. What could we dredge up about these dusty novels? Would we remember the same things about a shared book? Why did she remember Piggy’s crushed glasses but forget the conch?

Why could I remember the barren moors in such detail while all she could recall was Mr. Rochester nearly getting burned alive?

Both avid readers, we were intrigued by memory’s entanglements, the way one story we read decades ago could be drawn out intact while another emerged in flawed pieces. We took joy in the messy act of remembering—not necessarily in the accuracy.

I have come to learn that teaching literature is teaching not so much what but how to remember. With my students, I preface so many of my questions with, “Do you remember when…?” My students lament, “I know it happened, but I can’t find it on the page.” So, we open the book to find it—or we try to imagine the story unfolding in our mind’s eye. I have found that some students have an incredible memory for certain texts but not for others. Some are able recall sentences word for word while others struggle to remember the names of the main characters. Those who can retrieve the salient details are more able to participate in discussions and to write more fluent essays. Memory matters.

Failure To Remember Is Not A Failure To Read

Since adopting the KUA Design framework, I have rediscovered the sense of play that is inherent to remembering. Prior to adopting KUA Design, remembering in my classroom was a zero-sum game: Either you could remember the answer to the question on the quiz or you could not. If you did well on the quiz, you had read the assignment. If you did you poorly, then you hadn’t read. Forgetting the game that had delighted Maggie and me all those years ago, I equated reading with perfect recall. I lost sight of the joy in making sense of the mess.

Now, informed by the principles of KUA Design, I give “memory checks” to ninth-graders rather than reading quizzes. I understand that failure to remember does not necessarily mean a failure to read; rather, long-term memory can be built through retrieval practice. Poor results open a door to a conversation about improvement. We discuss, as a class, why we would like to remember what we read. Then we discuss strategies to build recollection of our reading. Does annotating help us retrieve information? What happens when we try visualizing a scene? What happens when we read at a desk rather than in a bed? The student who seems to remember everything may have the prior knowledge necessary to navigate the world of that text.

I may have remembered those moors in Jane Eyre because I had seen them on a trip to England; perhaps Maggie remembered Piggy’s broken glasses from Lord of the Flies because she herself was near-sighted. Thanks to KUA Design, if a student answers a question in an unexpected way, I approach the results with the same curiosity with which I approach my own capacity to remember a book from my past. I am able to appreciate the diversity of how we remember rather than expecting us all to remember the same thing in the same way.

I like to think that someday, years from now, my current students will return to a reunion on The Hilltop and seek me out. Likely, I will remember their faces but not their names. Likely, remembering my own favorite game, I will ask what they recall about the books in ninth-grade English. I hope they will respond to the question with curiosity and delight—what do I remember, why do I remember it, and how can I remember more? I hope I can walk away while they are still playing the game, comparing details that have been stored away for just such an occasion. Perhaps the science of learning and the science of relationships are one in the same. K