Study Tip – Sing your Textbooks!

Just as you would normally silently read through an assigned section of your textbook, sing the words instead.

For example, here’s a song in the tune of Agony from Into the Woods that I would sing as I draw out a glucose molecule to reinforce my memory of the structure.

A ring of 5                            Agony
C’s and 1 O                           Far more painful than yours
H then OH for C1, 2, 4      When you know she would go with you
Switch for C3                       If there only were doors

CH₂                                       Agony
OH then H for C5              All the torture they teach
If it is beta, switch C1       What’s as intriguing or half so fatiguing
Now it’s alternating          As what’s out of reach

Studying in song form has felt like a miracle for me, and I would highly recommend it to individuals, especially auditory learners, in those grueling textbook heavy courses.

In chemistry class last year, I was learning about the elements and which ones are diatomic, and for some reason i started to sing the elements to the song that was playing in my headphones. Even though my  singing is quite awful, I kept doing it (probably annoying my classmates) quietly and I quickly learned which elements were diatomic. From then on, whenever I had to memorize something, I would choose a simple song and change the lyrics.

It would usually be a song I knew well and loved, so I would enjoy studying as well. Even if it was just the chorus, it made me study, or think about the subject all the time. I would walk around the house singing chemistry equations or which verbs use etre for french. If you are doubting the effectiveness of this method, I will give you an example.

My french teacher was incredible last year, and had many funny acronyms to help us remember certain verbs, but with three other tough subjects at once, it was difficult to remember still. So I would use the acronyms and put them in songs. Last year we learned about the imparfait, which is a form of past tense in french, and it isn’t used often, except for a few verbs. The acronym my teacher created was SPACE CAP DAVE, which sounds funny so it was already memorable. One of my favourite artists, Joji, makes super relaxing and simple songs that are great to study to, so I will be using his song as an example. The original first few lyrics are “Yeah, all my friends no fun.Yeah my friends, they’re gone. They all left one by one. And now that summer’s done, they don’t need no more fun. ” So instead I would change them, and sing 1
them in the same tone, so that they correlate with the verbs that I am learning. For example: “SPACE CAP DAVE no fun. Yeah imparfait, they’re verbs. Savoir Pouvoir Avoir. And SPACE is not done, there is Connaitre Esperer.” And so on.