Too Fool for School?

I am sure that when most high school students talk about studying, they refer to how Quizlet and organized planners have saved their lives. But these methods prove challenging when one is as scatterbrained as I am. In today’s society “studying” looks like these stunning notebooks, I am here to be a ambassador for the lazy and unartistic, to once and for all prove that cute doesn’t cut it.

Being in La-la land is a problematic mindset to be in if productive and effective studying is the goal. However, a little bit of singing never hurt anybody. Singing is scientifically proven to boost your mood, health, and confidence as explained in this article. Putting facts to a song a terrific way to memorize the material. You do not have to be musically gifted to use this method either, it can be as simple as altering lyrics of a song or even reciting facts to a tune, (I would recommend rhyming as much as possible). If anybody scoffs at you for humming a little tune in the library, ask them how they learned the alphabet, or if they have heard of the periodic table song that was sung to “Can-Can”.

Mnemonics can be anything from the songs I mentioned above to images, poems, and my personal favorite, jokes. Ask any young person to quote The Office and they do it with ease; ask them to explain metabolic pathways, and most get a little confused. This is because our brain utilizes emotions to enhance our memory. This process works especially well with friends. Here is an example that I have created: In grade 9 science, one is expected to know different types of vision impairments. Astigmatism is when somebody gets distorted vision due to a football shaped eye; presbyopia is characterized by the poor ability to focus, usually due to aging. How do I still remember this useless information from 3 years ago? Well, Donald Trump may not be a great president but he sure is old so he probably has presbyopia. Have you ever heard of that football player Matt? I hear he is kind of an A$$.

How to Memorize with Mnemonics

This can be a bit of a stretch, but when you cant fit something to the tune of “Old Macdonald” or come up with a knock knock joke, it works perfectly fine. As you probably know consonance is repeated consonant sound and assonance is a repeated vowels sound. This works well when you are trying to associate one concept with another. For example, in Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”, The rich live in the East and West Eggs close to New York. One of the eggs is old money rich, like the royal family, and the other is new money rich, like Kanye. But which group goes where? East and old both start with vowels and West and New both start with consonants, and I hope that you can figure out the rest from there. This is not a perfect example for the technical terms of assonance and consonance, but it has the same underlying concept. When using this method make sure to always exaggerate your speech because a) it makes the similarities for obvious and, b) the more moronic the better the mnemonic! A.k.a. its okay to sound stupid to someone else if your get to show off superior test score afterwards.

Laura G. Siemens

Complete Test Preparation Inc. Scholarship