January 23rd, 2009 by Robin Green

According to a recent New York Times article, higher education learning systems across America are seeing large increases in the student enrollment in online courses compared to this time last year. One college in Massachusetts, for example, is quoted as saying that enrollment for its online courses is up to 114%.

Soaring gas prices were also believed to make home learning systems an especially attractive option. The Sloan Survey of Online Learning in 2008 asserted that higher fuel costs will lead to more students selecting online courses.

However, as gas prices have lowered, enrollments in online courses have continued to increase. I. Elaine Allen, an associate professor at Babson College and one of the report’s authors, says that online learning systems will continue to attract students for other reasons. “If you don’t have a job, lowering your gas costs is not your primary motivation for going back to school online,” she pointed out.

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January 23rd, 2009 by Robin Green

Of course, in a time of recession, adults tend to seek shelter in higher education learning systems. Anxiety about losing one’s job or finding another one is more than enough inspiration to hit the books and better one’s marketability.

The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning was released in November just as the scale of the recession was becoming clearer. The survey found that while all kinds of higher education learning systems expect high enrollment because of high unemployment, two-year and private institutions expect to increase their enrollments more than others.

Why? They tend to offer learning systems like online courses organized via an LMS, which are well-tailored to suit the needs of working adults. ”A lot of people want to increase their skill levels or get a degree they didn’t have,” says I. Elaine Allen, an associate professor at Babson College, one of the report’s authors.

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January 22nd, 2009 by Robin Green

In his book on Shakespare, Michael Wood observed that rote learning systems offer “many rewards, not least a sense of poetry, rhythm and refinement–a heightened feeling for language.”

Of course, a major benefit of rote poetry learning systems is the development and enrichment of language skills and appreciation. Good grammar and vocabulary are skills whose importance only becomes more profound as a student advances into middle and high school. They are especially critical for inner-city kids, who often come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low.

The “heightened feeling for language” that rote poetry learning systems provide helps students not only to appreciate literature, but to succeed throughout their academic and professional careers.

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January 22nd, 2009 by Robin Green

Michael Knox Beran points out that long before children begin school, parents create a learning system with the primitive poetry of the nursery rhyme. Before a two-year-old understands the meaning of nursery rhyme words, he or she delights in the rhythm and rhyme of the verse.

“Poetry provides an abstract system of order and harmony,” writes Beran. “The rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves.”

What a child discovers, then, is not only aesthetically pleasing but critical for cognitive development. Rote poetry learning systems teach kids a great deal about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation, and mood. Grasping these concepts in a rote learning system is the most fundamental kind of learning, “for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience.”

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January 22nd, 2009 by Robin Green

Of course, rote learning systems for multiplication tables are a little different from poetry. You’ll probably use multiplication your entire life; you won’t necessarily need to pull out Shelley’s “To a Skylark” at any particular moment. Donald R. Tippit, principal of Junior High School 164 in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, articulated what many educators are saying: “Instead of memorizing, we emphasize mastery of concepts and skills.”

But there are some hidden and important benefits to rote poetry learning systems for children.

According to Michael Knox Beran, whose “In Defense of Memorization” was featured in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, rote learning systems offer distinct cognitive benefits.

The memorization and recitation of poetry and prose dates back to the ancient Greeks, who “discovered that words and sounds–and the rhythmic patterns by which they were bound together in poetry–awakened the mind and shaped character.”

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January 21st, 2009 by Robin Green

One benefit of rote learning systems is the confidence students gain. In a rote learning system like the Off By Heart competition, performing a poem by heart can be a memorable and satisfying experience for students who may be struggling in certain subjects.

But poetry isn’t the only important rote learning system. For example, with the primary school math curriculum becoming as extensive as it is, teachers often can’t afford to take time to ensure that students learn basic facts. This is where memorization at home comes in.

I remember clearly the summer I had to memorize the multiplication tables. I’d had all summer to learn them, but now only a week remained before school started. The sun was shining and my family was out boating on the lake while I sat inside reciting and whimpering. But I did finally memorize them.

Who knows? Without those tables in my brain, I might have fallen through the math class cracks later on in my academic career.

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January 21st, 2009 by Robin Green

Daisy Goodwin, organizer of the Off By Heart rote poetry competition, said she hopes to revive poetry’s popularity among the young. “Poetry still has a chance of surviving as a popular art form rather than something arcane and unloved,” she said.

When it was suggested that rote learning systems are a Victorian kind of learning system, she responded: “What’s wrong with that? It’s going to breathe life into a genre that needs all the help it can get. If you can involve kids at an early stage that’s got to be a good thing.”

But besides instilling new life to poetry, there are other benefits for participants in the rote poetry learning system. Learning a poem by heart, said Goodwin, gives children a “different relationship” with it.

“They own it,” she said. “Learnt young, poems will stay in the head for life, adding lustre to the good moments and illumination in the bad.”

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January 21st, 2009 by Robin Green

With all the attention spent in classroom learning systems on problem-solving, collaboration, inter-personal and other 21st century skills, is there a space for good old memorization skills as well? Some educators think memorization continues to merit inclusion in their learning systems.

Take Daisy Goodwin, organizer of Off By Heart, a Victorian-style rote learning competition in the UK. Over 1,000 schools have signed up for the competition so far, which will see primary school children reciting poems such as “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth, and “The Owl and The Pussycat” by Edward Lear. Organizers are hoping to reproduce the same success that the BBC’s spelling bee competition, Hard Spell, saw with its 100,000 participants in 2004.

But what’s the purpose of a learning system that has students memorize poetry, or anything else for that matter? (See the next post.)

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