When is a Verse Memorized?

Posted on October 10, 2011 Andy 38 comments

I want to encourage you to not focus too much on Memverse's designation of whether or not a verse is memorized. We picked 30 days as an arbitrary milestone which wouldn't prove to be too elusive but was also something to strive for. Truly committing a verse to memory, though, takes a lot longer and will likely require you to frequently select option 1 or 2 and start again.

Let me illustrate my point. All of us at some point had the equation for the roots of a quadratic drummed into our heads in high school. I remember being able to wake up in the middle of the night and recite it without hesitation. Like so much we learn, after leaving school I never had occasion to use the equation for about a decade. A year ago, I had to solve a quadratic and was astonished to find that I couldn't recall the formula. Something that I had once memorized perfectly was no longer accessible.

Fortunately, I asked Google and it gave me the answer. What I found interesting is that a single refreshing of that memory (after more than a decade) was sufficient to completely lay down the track again. I'm fairly sure I will remember it for the next twenty years.

This is why it is best to rate yourself as honestly as possible when reviewing your verses. I've been using Memverse now for over two years and I am starting to experience some of my early verses that I haven't had to review for a long time come up again. Some of them I remember and as I type them out again I can feel the memory track getting deeper. Others I have to reset and over the next few months, as the interval grows again, I get to really know them well.

That's how Memverse is designed to work. Next time you experience your mouse swaying between option 2 and 3, remember that the race is long and not necessarily to the swift. It's often better to reset a verse earlier, rather than later.

Incidentally: the roots of a quadratic are given by: -b +- sqrt(b^2-4ac)/2a