Originally Posted by
jpx7
It seems it's actually pretty oddly-common, at least judging by my anecdotal sample. My high-school in NW Florida gave us choices (during sophomore-year English) of the passages for mandatory memorization, and the opening of the GP was amongst those; I don't think anybody took that route my year, but I wish I had, since at that point I still had a nice soft adolescent brain for memorizing whatever. Instead, I still have "easy" poems like We Real Cool, Fire and Ice, and The Red Wheelbarrow forever mnemonically lodged in my brain; meanwhile, if I try to memorize a poem or passage now, it's gone in a month without some sort of active maintenance.