Something a teacher told me got me to thinking...

[Entropymama]

how strict are you on dates and memorizing?

 

The comment made was during a discussion about teaching history. I mentioned I'm pretty big on memorizing dates, names and facts, to which she replied "Oh, I don't care much about that. As long as they can tell me the general time period, like late 1800's, I'm good." She teaches 5th grade.

 

I'm not putting the teacher down, so let's not use this as a bash ps teachers thread. :) But is that attitude good enough? Does it matter if they know the exact dates to events or is understanding a timeline of events enough (i.e. The Civil War occured before the telephone was invented).

 

What do you think?

[Caraway]

Well, some of the way back ancient dates they time to only a "period" since they don't really know.

 

However recent dates, I think if you are going to learn them then you should learn the actual date!

 

For me though, I am (as an adult) wishing I could just get to the general sense of which came first. Probably because my teachers didn't really care if we knew the dates.:glare:

[asta]

I think there are people who are date memorizers and there are people who aren't. I don't think either is better than the other, I just think they think differently. I think that both types get the gist of the flow of history, and, if taught well, keep things in their proper order.

 

My husband doesn't do dates at all, but he knows, within 10 years or so, when all of the significant historical stuff prior to WWI happened. I think that is good enough for most people. He had a roommate once upon a time who could tell you exact dates for everything. Totally different type of thinker.

 

 

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[Dmmetler]

I went from an undergrad music history program which was of the "Listen, identify features of the music, and draw conclusions based on that"-so if you could identify a piece as the second movement of a Sonata from the classical time period and that it is probably Mozart , and support all those statements (in what usually was a page or more written response), that was considered to be excellent-with the level of detail expected increasing as you progressed through the program. I could easily have written 2-3 pages on a 5 minute sample on first listening at the time. Even if you knew, on first listening, that this was Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, you'd better be able to justify WHY it's Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with more than "It's the dinosaurs in Fantasia".

 

When I did my graduate entrance exams, the school I was at followed a "drop the needle" philosophy, where you memorized tons of musical themes and paired them with the composer, opus numbers and dates-but not the detail. Lots of Mnemonics were used for this purpose (If you've ever seen "From Bach to Worse" you know the sort of thing).

 

So, when we did the exams, I'd write a paragraph, or more, while the person sitting next to me would scrawl that specific title/date.

 

I didn't stay in that program too long-I wanted to study music in depth, not win at Jeopardy.

 

I do see a place for both-I wouldn't have been able to do the interpretive work and draw the conclusions if I hadn't memorized, for example, that Bach was in the Baroque period, not the Classical one, or that the Organ is a Baroque instrument, but the piano didn't come into existence until the Classical era, or when various other instruments were created. That memorization is important.But I also feel that the ability to USE that knowledge is more important. The memorization is the scaffold on which to build the building-not the whole house!

 

I think there can be a danger, especially if you're focused on Classical or traditional education, to focus on memorization longer than it should be the focus-probably because it's the easiest to teach, while it gets a little harder in the Logic and Rhetoric stage. Conversely, public education has focused on "Higher order thinking" to such a big degree that it's been forgotten that kids SHOULD crawl before they walk, and that if you don't have that scaffolding, it's hard to build a house.

[Angel]

I am not as concerned about exact dates. I'm a time period person, I guess. In American History in High School, we memorized date after date after date (and so on and so forth). I don't remember a thing. Especially all those battles :confused: I don't remember learning half the things that my kids are learning. So if my girls remember Lewis and Clark and George Washington and King Tut and Queen Elizabeth I and other historical figures and the particulars of their life and times, I don't care if they can put an exact date on that.

[NanceXToo]

I think a time period is fine, in most cases. I would not make my child memorize any dates. I might reiterate things like, say, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, but I think that to start memorizing too many dates would only be temporary anyway. If it's not something they're going to regularly "use" it'll just go out of their heads one day (I would think) anyway.

[Janet in WA]

Personally, I don't remember any dates I ever memorized for a test. The only dates I remember are those to which I was repeatedly exposed, and in more than one context. I asked our sons to memorize only things I knew they would use often enough to remember them. That didn't include many dates.

 

Much more effective and useful, in my experience, was building timelines.

[stripe]

Maybe this also depends on the age. What is impressive for a 5th grader (e.g. "late 1800s") might not cut it for an older child.

[Kirch]

For major events/people, I think it's good to know the dates because it can greatly impact your understanding of the events of the time period (i.e., whether something happened before or after the beginning of WWI)--the causes, the ideas or sentiments that were prevalent at the time, etc. I don't see much value in memorizing lots of detailed dates beyond that, though, unless you're going to do an in-depth study of the time period. So, the dates of the civil war, yes, but not the dates of the battles. I can understand the influences that might have impacted something that occurred in 1862 because I know when the Civil War was without needing to know the dates of even the major battles. Some of those might help, but generally I won't need to know that much detail for daily use, and if I do, I can always look it up.

[usetoschool]

We pick some important, world changing dates to memorize and then just kind of ball park whether other events occurred before or after the hook dates. So, a little of both I guess.

[Big Buckin' Longhorn]

I'm more of a time period person.

 

I always thought that focusing on the exact date and memorizing it and drilling it over and over took all the joy and life out of history. I didn't want my son growing up hating history the way I did. We enjoyed learning what actually happened and didn't worry ourselves with the exact date it happened on. We do focus on proper order and context, hence the "time period" personality I mentioned.

 

It got him through college history classes just fine, but he is not a history major, so YMMV.

 

Also, he still does enjoy learning about history. That was really my goal. I feel I was really gypped in history class. It could have really sparked my love of learning, but instead it just festered my hate of rote memorization.

[Perry]

We pick some important, world changing dates to memorize and then just kind of ball park whether other events occurred before or after the hook dates. So, a little of both I guess.

This is what we do, also.

[mrbmom77]

I'll graduate in December with a BA in History. Not one of my profs tests on dates. I think most historians are more concerned with causes and consequences. Why did this happen? Who were the major players? What was the general culture at the time and how did that play into events? What were the results of the event under consideration?

It's important to know general periods and chronology to truly understand but except for a few biggies like the Declaration, I don't think exact dates are important.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

how strict are you on dates and memorizing?

 

The comment made was during a discussion about teaching history. I mentioned I'm pretty big on memorizing dates, names and facts, to which she replied "Oh, I don't care much about that. As long as they can tell me the general time period, like late 1800's, I'm good." She teaches 5th grade.

 

I'm not putting the teacher down, so let's not use this as a bash ps teachers thread. :) But is that attitude good enough? Does it matter if they know the exact dates to events or is understanding a timeline of events enough (i.e. The Civil War occured before the telephone was invented).

 

What do you think?

 

I use a peg or hook approach. There are certain dates that I think they should know (Pompeii, Destruction of Jerusalem, Fall of Rome, Founding of Jamestown, Constitution, Civil War for example). Then I expect that they will know that certain other things were before, during or after the specific event. For example, I think it is worth knowing that the Titanic sunk before WWI (and not in the 1920s) because it contributes to the sense of losing technical mastery and loss of innocence that characterized WWI (and which the 20s were in part a reaction to).

 

But I also think that there will always be things that you know better than others. DH knows WWI very well and it bugged him to no end that the gas attack in the movie Legends of the Fall was several months before the first actual gas attack in the war.

[Laurie4b]

I think general time period is very sensible. There are some key events I like to know (and have my kids know) dates for, but only a select few. If you memorize dates as part of the overall "grammar" period in classical education, that's fine; however, I don't see it as necessary to an adult understanding of history.

[Slartibartfast]

I think some dates are important or at least the order in which things happened. It really depends, of course it is necessary to know things like Appomattox or the Treaty of Versailles but I do not think ALL dates are imperative.

 

Things are related and there are often fascinating things that connect them, one can use the main important dates to connect the other events together. It is more than looking at a timeline to me, it is understanding how things are related. I think if one studies that aspect then the dates will come naturally.

 

That may or may not make sense. :lol:

 

History has always been my favorite subject and is my favorite to teach. :)

Edited May 24, 2010 by Sis

[Corraleno]

Personally, I don't remember any dates I ever memorized for a test. The only dates I remember are those to which I was repeatedly exposed, and in more than one context. I asked our sons to memorize only things I knew they would use often enough to remember them. That didn't include many dates.

 

Much more effective and useful, in my experience, was building timelines.

 

I'll graduate in December with a BA in History. Not one of my profs tests on dates. I think most historians are more concerned with causes and consequences. Why did this happen? Who were the major players? What was the general culture at the time and how did that play into events? What were the results of the event under consideration?

It's important to know general periods and chronology to truly understand but except for a few biggies like the Declaration, I don't think exact dates are important.

:iagree:

 

Jackie

[Laura Corin]

It's worth considering what use the information will be put to. For example, I got a very low mark in my A level History (rough AP equivalent) because I didn't have enough specific details, including dates, to back up my assertions. So I needed the detail at that point. I'm not sure that detailed dates are useful at an earlier point: I'd rather my boys spent time on learning poems or foreign language vocabulary.

 

Laura

[linders]

In American history, for example, Declaration of Independence 1776, Civil War 1861-1865, etc. A few specific dates gives a "hook" for the rest - for example, if DC then know that an event happened "just before the Civil War," they have a sense it was just about mid-1800s.

[Mad Jenny Flint]

I don't want to smother them with dates, when just keeping the information, the context, and the players straight can be overwhelming enough.

[Peela]

Nope, not a big deal to me at all.

However, we do do memory work of poetry.

I am not big on dates.

[Teachin'Mine]

For fifth grade, I think the ps teacher is right. :) And it's not too often I say that. lol

 

In school, I memorized all the dates required for tests including every battle of the Revolutionary War. I had absolutely no sense of what history was about or how any of the dates of separate events fit together. For my dd, in the early grades, I was much more interested in her learning what history was about. The whys were more important than the precise whens. Now she's memorizing dates as it's required for her tests.

[Entropymama]

Wow, thanks everybody!

 

Now I don't feel so bad about slacking on the date memorizing. I just always thought it was important, but man do they hate it. :tongue_smilie: