To paraphrase the late, great Romantic poet Joey Ramone, "technology did a job on me, now I am a real sickie …"
A very nice and very lost old woman with a pie showed up on my doorstep at 8 p.m. last night. Unfortunately, the pie was meant for the occupants of another house on a nearby street. She asked me where the street was, and, as I considered the ethics of grabbing the pie and slamming my door, I gave her some vague directions. Mainly, I pointed and said, "It's kinda over there." In my mind, I was picturing the street that was one street over and perpendicular to my front door. The old woman disappeared into the night. I went inside and ate two Entenmann's chocolate donuts (the rich man's Hostess!) and watched my son play either a freeform jazz version of "Baba O'Reilly" or "Hot Cross Buns" on his clarinet.
The next morning on the way to school, I realized the street the old woman was looking for was actually the street behind my house. I have lived here for three years, and I know of the existence of the street, that friends of mine live on it, and that it is somewhere in my neighborhood, but I was wrong about where it actually sat.
Now, I may simply be a clueless bozo, and I realize that any success I have ever had was because of my staggering good looks, but I started wondering about why I didn't actually have my neighborhood (or city for that matter) mapped out in my head by street names. I can get anyone anywhere in Columbia as long as I am driving, but if someone asks me to explain HOW to drive somewhere, I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it.
Street names seem like a basic piece of information I should know — clearly, they represent the physical structure of the world around me and are meant to provide points for my memory to grab onto — but I don't know them.
In the past couple of years, I have had more than one conversation with a law student where I have asked, "And who is your professor for ….." More times than I would've thought, they actually didn't know the professor's name. At first, I found this completely mind-boggling, and then I started thinking about my problem with streets.
The thing is, with GPS and Googlemaps and my phone I have no reason to learn street names, and that technology has basically made me stop paying attention so I never learn them.
I think the same thing has happened with our students, but over a longer period, and without a B.T. ("Before Tech") Era where they had to rely on their own memory to get places or know things. Tech has made a lot of memorization absolutely unnecessary. During the old days, for many classes, at the end of the day I probably didn't HAVE to know my professors' names — I knew where the class was, I knew the class hour, and I was studying the material so I could handle myself if called on — but, because I was used to having to memorize things like streets and state capitals, my brain naturally picked up the professor's name and threw it in Ye Olde Memory Hole.
With the amazing amount of computing power sitting in all of our pockets, memorization is pretty much as dead as disco. If I want to know a state capital or how many hits Ted Williams had, I can immediately look it up on my phone. For the digital natives we are currently teaching, they had a schooling where it was basically unnecessary to ever memorize anything. I think in many ways their brains are not used to having to memorize and "know" things to be able to use the information, so many of them don't naturally grab pieces of information by default.
So, when I have a student in trouble, I counsel them to memorize law the old fashioned way — by memorizing their outline, putting it aside, and then writing it out, by hand, on a yellow legal pad. I'm not a big fan of turning them to online types of techniques, like apps or sites with flashcards or what not. As much as I can, I want to get the computer out of it, because I feel like that caused the problem in the first place.
(Alex Ruskell)
