You Must (You think) Remember This

Richard Cooper, India

Richard Cooper is Executive Director of International Training Consultants Ltd and India, editor of Jetwork and is based in Bombay. E-mail bandrabandstand@mac.com

Pilgrims used to host something called the Farewell Party on the last Friday night of the two-week summer teacher training courses at the hilltop campus of the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. For this last night, groups with their tutors organized entertainments for the others. They put on skits, sang songs, did crazy stuff. It was great. Goodbyes at the end of courses are quieter these days, the party’s gone, but the goodbyes are no less warm.

I remember the following episode from a Farewell. More than remember it, I have it word for word. It was summer 1985, the summer it rained nearly every day in August in East Kent (every day but August 30). There were maybe 300 people at the party. It was hopping and getting more so by the minute. When it was his turn to lead the big group, a trainer got up and said, “Hello everybody! I want to demonstrate how easy it is to train memory not to forget things. It’s very simple but I predict 20 years from now you will still remember this ordinary non-inherently memorable text. Here is the text:

‘Passengers are requested to cross the lines by the footbridge. All season tickets must be shown, by order.’

That is a typical sign you can find somewhere in nearly every English train station. Yet unless I do something with that text for you, you will probably just forget it. Forget it fast. So let’s see what I can do to it so that we don’t forget it. Here’s what to do. I am going to divide all of you up into 5 groups. You, you, you, you and you. Okay?” He then began to sing the text as if it were a strident march, heroic, determined, triumphant and ridiculous given the actual words: ‘Passengers are requested to cross the lines by the footbridge.’” Then group by group at his signal he led us in a chant of this part of the text. Then he “taught” us the second section: “’All season tickets must be shown-By order.’” Whereas the first section rose steadily in the octave, the second settled back to where it started.

After only this one run-through, he started with the first group. He had them begin the first line, then cued the second group before the first had finished the first sentence. Then the third group at the same interval, and so on round the group and through the second sentence until everyone had sung the piece, raising the volume in the room into a vast choral frères jacques effect. He led us like a conductor of a mighty Beethovean symphony that then finished group by group: “’By order. By order. By order. By order. By order.’” The whole group whooped with joy.

But he wasn’t done yet. He called on someone, anyone: “who can sing it?” Someone jumped up and belted, “Passengers are requested to cross the lines by the footbridge! All season tickets must be shown - By order!” She got a roar of approval.

Now he turned to the group. “See the power of music? In 5 minutes 300 people have all more or less learned a string of 18 words not quite random though hardly memorable words and repeated them without fail. In other words, we did it. We made something memorable and the brain got engaged. Bottomline, brains seem to do best with almost none of our usual overstriving help.”

For the last 23 years since that evening’s entertainment, the catchy tune has been periodically in my head like a “brainworm” as described in Oliver Sacks’s recent Musicophilia, an unshakeable tune in the mind, not necessarily pathological, but at any rate successfully sticky. Whenever I happen to see Des O’Sullivan who was there that night—and now that I am in India and he in Oxford that is getting rarer—we inevitably get that look in our eye and burst out in the chant in perfect sync, including the clunky tune. Our company is amused and maybe just a little concerned.

It’s been long argued, even before Michael Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, that language teaching is after conveying a sense of stickiness to what we do and of course to what they do, to making input survive the post-course realworld of distractions, preoccupations, dayjobs, worries and countless peddlers after mindshare. Ye it is one small triumph for me when that memory trots out unabashed and unbroken across the expanse of all those years, as bright and fresh as the moment it first happened. Though to be fair, if I venture in any direction adjacent to the topology of that memory I quickly run into serious broken-country forgetfulness. I vaguely remember other signs sung that evening on the Hilltop but I don’t remember them. I don’t remember the teacher either. My story has one so there he is. Maybe he was not a he. Essentially all I remember is the sign being sung, and my singing it still, and not much more.

Why this one in particular? What was the “big” moment of it, the searing into my neuronal self, a notion of memory over time Tor Nørretranders calls permanent reincarnation (www.edge.org/q2008/q08_4.html). Despite the flux of self, I find the memory holding firm in with all the rush-hour riders of my memory coming and going and after the seemingly scarce available seating and standing room space I think of recall. In fact there is plenty of room in the mind. Storage is not the issue. The problem is analogous perhaps to the case of the mobile telephone entertainment business on the verge of taking off as the next big technological thing. As pointed out to me by Neeraj Roy, CEO of one of India’s largest mobile entertainment companies, “The task at hand [to access information] is complex. Over 8000 devices and more than 100 formats to which this content has to be formatted and transcoded. The key [to becoming a business winner] will be search and discovery of content.” Memory, some memory, any memory, survives the onslaught of reformatting and transcoding subjectivity, trauma and delight until the brain fortuitously stores memory with just the right content trigger, whatever that is. Proust called that trigger a madeleine. But I have no idea what madeleine triggers “passengers...”.

The sung sign is a memory heard or felt as if a foghorn inescapable in the night. An apparent random tidbit amid all the clutter when I would rather remember Cole Porter lyrics, the varietals in decent Cotes du Rhone, bibliographic links, poetry, my poetry, timely quotes, timely stats, an endless list of things among which actual memory recall seem in the final analysis few and far between, survivors that seem to wander shellshocked on a battleground of otherwise presumptive cognitive overload. I try to make sense of things. I am even prepared to accept the defeat of being largely unable to remember the nitty gritty of what I think I would like to remember is still better than a mechanistic memory without cryptic, sometimes revelatory biases, that I have my favorites (though not all of them?), this one pristine, that one challenged as imposter, this one someone else’s, all sticky somehow. And that one on the tip of my tongue and where it’s been for years. I wonder if my learners are like me, coping with memory that has a mind of its own. I suspect they are. Acquisition is a transaction, a sometime thing, a tune you can’t shake. 23 years later, I still got music.