by Val Diggle

Created on: November 19, 2009   Last Updated: November 23, 2009

Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving! Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving!

The line of nine year olds shimmied in and out of the classroom chairs, improvised a conga along the school corridor and down the stairs into the playground.

Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving!

R-H-Y-T-H-M

Bringing up the rear, knocking two discarded drinks cans together, was the class teacher. It had started out as an ordinary music lesson, but after that particular Tuesday afternoon in February, no-one in his class was ever going to forget how to spell that troublesome word.

Children are haptic creatures - they learn through their bodies, and it is the rhythm of the repeated folk tale at bed-time, with its refrain and its cadence I'll huff and I'll puff that first patterns our waking and sleeping, and that enables us to filter and then absorb information from the world, in all its terrifying complexity. The repeated mnemonic is a powerful learning device. We use it to organise in our minds the colours of the rainbow, the months of the year and the fate of Henry VIII's wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded survived). The recitation of these key pieces of information during the span of a single afternoon can hook the knowledge so securely that it lasts a lifetime.

Across the world, playgrounds echo to skipping rhymes and clapping songs that have been, literally, handed down through the generations. Inside the classroom, this natural capacity to learn through traditional recitation techniques, if harnessed imaginatively, can inform the way that essential chunks of knowledge, like multiplication tables, lodge in the memory.

Rote learning has fallen out of favour as a teaching strategy because it tended to involve, historically, dully acquiring basic knowledge without any cognitive understanding. Any information that is absorbed parrot fashion has limited value because it is isolated, devoid of any meaningful connection to other knowledge, and therefore impossible to transfer. It sits in the pocket of our memories and rattles around, like loose change from a foreign country. Rote learning has also been stigmatised by the punishment that was sometimes meted out when children failed to memorise the set task accurately. But there is a subtle, important, difference between learning parrot fashion and learning by heart.

I was introduced to the poetry of Wordsworth by an enthusiastic head-teacher in a tiny rural primary school. All the children in my class, who, due to small numbers on the

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