Memory Abuse

Everyone has a photographic memory; not everyone has film.

The setting: It’s two in the afternoon, and I’ve just been administered my daily dosage of that dreaded medication: school. I find myself deceptively confronted with hours of freedom, of which, most are devoured by a few hours of troubled sleep and mealtimes. Monolithic stacks of homework and college applications, beneath the weight of which my solid oak desk is actually warping, digest my remaining time. I guess my freedom during the school year is just like an easy calculus test: non-existent.

The dilemma: Granted, every once in a while a freak opportunity (heck, a miracle) arises in which I have the option of genuine freedom, but do I grab hold of it like a teenager grabs car keys? No; rather than absorbing mind-numbing sitcoms or relaxing comic books, like I should be doing during my final year in high school, I find myself doing "get ahead" homework like research papers and the like.

The villain: "Ted," the tinny voice squeals over the phone line, "Tell me the memory work isn’t due THIS Friday!" Whoops. I realize that my caller’s mistake is also my own, and procrastination in favor of immediate homework demands is the victor over us both. You see, either by design or accident, the term "waste of time" takes the form of "memory work" within the confines of Grafton High School.

Okay, memory is important. I wouldn’t like to wait a decade to use an ATM machine and have to root around in my wallet for a PIN when my turn comes. After all, with half of Yorktown’s population in the line behind me breathing down my neck, the temperature and tension might be a little high. Don’t you hate it when you call someone by "his or her" name, and realize nanoseconds later that the person and the name don’t match? Then your brain has to simultaneously apologize for your error and prepare and launch and expedition into its database to find the right name. And correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t anniversary nights be spent doing something much more enjoyable than sleeping on the couch because of forgetting the anniversary completely?

Problems arise when people use different memories (long- and short-term) for the wrong things. For example, I can still sing my ABCs better than the squirts who had kindergarten last year. I still have nightmares about the multiplication tables. I still know my social security number. But I can’t for the life of me remember the entire poem by William Wordsworth entitled "The World is Too Much With Us." Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but one month ago I could have recited the whole thing. The "memory work" of York County School English classes is rendered pointless in its implementation. Rather than drill the literature into our heads (long-term, like "The Pledge of Allegiance"), the teachers merely require us to recite a few lines on one occasion.

Naturally, with more pressing homework at hand, memory work always assumes a back seat position until the "remember?" phone call three days prior to the due date. Scientific studies (and watching anyone trying to program a VCR) prove that we don’t use enough of that gray gunk in our heads… usually. I say "usually" because last month I felt what saturation of the brain feels like. Grabbing a friend’s baton and swinging it around while pacing the senior lounge to maintain a perfect concentration, I spent an entire afternoon memorizing four eighteen-line poems (I’m surprised I still remember my full name). I pushed, squeezed, and wiggled all of the words around until each occupied a designated number of neurons in my brain, then hammered boards and nails across the front as I ran to the English room for a mind dump. The board buckled and snapped when I reached her desk, and all four poems spilled out of my mouth and into the teacher’s gradebook. I must have exhausted myself, because I quit calculus homework early that night so that I might sleep for a little more than five hours! What were they about? I don’t know. Can I recite the poems now? Don’t make me laugh. Just like a rag, I was wringing out the last drops of the leftover poetry from my mind just the other day when we received our next "memory work" assignment; yippee, let’s throw a party.

In grade school, we learned how to memorize. In high school, we should be learning why we memorized. In grade school we stocked our long-term memory with useful basics, and in high school we should be building on these basics instead of starting from scratch. Rather than encouraging long-term memorization of literature, "memory work" encourages a quick short-term memorization for an easy "A." Simply, its not doing many of us any good, but it is doing an exceptional job of wasting our already precious time. If we were meant to remember everything at first sight, we’d all be elephants, or at least have their brains. But then wouldn’t our heads look kinda funny?