Challenge (for Tool #11): Use a Melody

[Challenge time: 30-60 minutes]

Okay, so it's time to try this out. Follow these simple steps:

1. To begin, choose a melody to set the information to, such as:

   a. Harry Potter's Main Theme (Hedwig's Theme)
   b. Imperial March from Star Wars
   c. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
   d. Firework, by Katy Perry
   e. Despacito, by Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee ft. Justin Bieber

(Note: you can click on the links to listen to the melodies)

2. Next, choose a topic that you are learning right now, such as:

   a. trigonometric identities
   b. chambers, valves, and vessels of the human heart
   c. major WWI events
   d. countries and capitals of a particular continent

   (OR, pick a topic to memorize that everyone needs to know, such as)

   e. first 20 elements of the periodic table

   f. rules for writing a paragraph

   g. rules for BEDMAS

 3. Finally, you probably need some scratch paper or a computer to write down the key words and important information as you set them to the melody.


Good luck!


And remember, even if in the end you don't completely memorize your melody, or you struggle to get the words to sound just right, going through the process will get the information to stick better in your memory!

Challenge (for Tool #2): Colour Coding

Do you remember our post about Colour-Coding? You can now practice that strategy with this challenge. Are you ready for it?

You can find below some information about eight contemporary LGBTQ writers. Read all about them and decide what information is more relevant than other. Then, decide how many categories would you use to sum that information up and assign a colour to each of those categories using your more brightest highlighters. 

Emma Donoghue was Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, being the youngest of eight children. She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, earning a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin in 1990. She received her PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge in 1997. Since 1998 she lives in London, Ontario with her partner Chris Roulston and their son Finn and daughter Una. Emma is best known for her fiction, which has been translated into over forty languages. Some of her books include My newest venture (for middle-grade readers, 8 to 12), The Wonder (a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize inspired by about fifty cases of 'fasting girls' over the centuries), Frog Music (a literary mystery inspired by a never-solved murder of a crossdressing frog catcher in San Francisco in 1876) and Room (narrated by a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside). Emma herself adapted Room for the big screen and the consequent film was shortlisted for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Brad Fraser is one of Canada's best known playwrights, in addition to being a director for stage and film, a talk show host and wearing many other hats. Born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1959, Brad won his first playwritings competition at the age of 17 and has been writing ever since. Brad's International hit play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects PlayRites festival in 1989. It has since been produced worldwide, with highly successful runs in Toronto, New York, Chicago, Milan, Sydney, London, Athens, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. Poor Super Man, developed by Canadian Stage, was first produced by the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in 1994 and has enjoyed successful runs in such diverse cities as Sydney, Edinburgh, London, Denver and Toronto, Ontario. It was nominated for a Governor Generals Award for Drama and has now been developed into a feature film with Brad as writer and director.  Brad also worked as a writer and Supervising Producer on Showtime's highly popular Queer As Folk for three seasons and continues to develop scripts for film, TV and Stage.

Tomson Highway was born in a snow bank on the Manitoba/Nunavut border to a family of nomadic caribou hunters. He had the great privilege of growing up in two languages, neither of which was French or English; they were Cree, his mother tongue, and Dene, the language of the neighbouring "nation," a people with whom they roamed and hunted. Today, he enjoys an international career as playwright, novelist, and pianist/songwriter. His best known works are the plays The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Rose, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout and the best-selling novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen. For many years, he ran Canada's premiere Native theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts (based in Toronto), out of which has emerged an entire generation of professional Native playwrights, actors and, more indirectly, the many other Native theatre companies that now dot the country. He divides his year equally between a cottage in northern Ontario (near Sudbury, from whence comes his partner of 29 years) and Gatineau Québec, at both of which locales he is currently at work on his second novel. In 2013, he published his most recent play, The (Post) Mistress; a One-Woman Musical. 

Born in 1948 and deceased in 1989, Bernard-Marie Koltès is one of those shooting stars that streak across the literary sky and vanish all too quickly. His language reflects a world view pervaded by upheaval and the guilt of decolonization; his theatre is urban, ambiguous, seductive. His intense, rigorous body of work includes the masterpieces Combat de nègre et de chiens (1979), Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1985), Le retour au désert (1988) and Roberto Zucco (1988); his plays have been staged by the great Peter Stein in Berlin and, notably, Patrice Chéreau in Nanterre and Paris. Here in Canada, Brigitte Haentjens has directed Combat de nègre et de chiens and two productions of La nuit juste avant les forêts.

Tony Kushner: Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Some of his other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia or Homebody/Kabul. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels In America, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich.  In 2012 he wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's movie Lincoln. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Chicago Film Critics Award, and several others. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, two Oscar nominations, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the 2012 National Medal of Arts, and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater Award, among many others. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock.

Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995)—one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer—was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII. Her first published story, Prisoner, received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published, and in 2017 she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre.

Alana Portero (Madrid, 1978) is one of the most stimulating voices of present-day Spanish poetry. Her voice reverberates in baroque and cavernous verses in which she speaks of a personal process such as the transition of a transgender person, full of feminist referents and vindictive vehemence. She has published the poetry books Música silenciosa (Silent Music ,2008), Fantasmas (Ghosts, 2010) and Irredento (2011), all of them under the Endymion Publishing House. After that she published La próxima tormenta (The next storm, 2014) and, most recently, La habitación de las ahogadas (The room of the drowned women, 2017). On that book she establishes a connection with Virginia Woolf's own room, perhaps with a darker background, but at the same time talking about the way to escape, to flee, into that place that we can create when there is no physical place in which to take refuge. Her work includes as well references to neurodivergence, to race, to class and any other issue that encompasses everything that can be considered transfeminism. None of her books have been yet translated into English. She also directs the theater company STRIGA and writes regularly on the Spanish journalism project El salto diario. 

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Little Stranger (2009), and The Paying Guests (2014). Most of her novels were shortlisted for some of the most prestigious literary awards, such as the Man Booker Prize or the Orange Prize. She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year by both publishers and booksellers at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference. Adaptations include Tipping the Velvet (multi award winning, BAFTA nominated) for BBC; Fingersmith (BAFTA nominated) for BBC; Affinity (several awards worldwide) for ITV; and The Night Watch for BBC.

Tool #11: Use a Melody

Have you ever noticed that song lyrics are easier to remember than the lines of a poem? Music is memorable. That's why the melody for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star was used to help children memorize the alphabet.

Also, you might remember from your childhood some cartoons using catchy music specifically created for educational purposes. Like this Planet Song, designed for little kids to learn about the planets.  

Although you are definitely not a kid anymore, you still can use that strategy to keep on learning and memorizing! 

Similar to what happened with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, this is a short piece from Animaniacs in which they use Jarabe tapatío -the national dance of Mexico, often referred to as the Mexican hat dance- as a way to memorize all countries in the world. (If you like it and want to learn them all after this song, please keep in mind the cartoon is from some years ago and some of the countries do not longer exist. Also, it includes territories and nations that are not considered states by the UN) 

Combining any information you need to memorize with a pre-existing song can be a challenging task. How do you pick the perfect song for that amount of information? Well, remember that the other option is creating your own melodies for that. Do you need an example? Take a look then on this clip from Hannah Montana, where she makes different songs to memorize the bones of the body. 

You can do the same thing. Take a familiar tune and change the lyrics into material that you need to know for your upcoming test. If that's too complicated, it's your time to become a composer. Just try not to hum too loudly during the test, please!!

BONUS TRACK: we were unable to decide whether to include the World Countries Song or this other one to memorize the periodic table using the popular Can Can, by French composer Jacques Offenbach. That's why we add it here, in case you want to use it some time.

Tool #10: Go Large: Chart Paper for Study Notes

[Reading time: 5 minutes]

Do you always make study notes on 8 1/2 X 11 " loose leaf? Then mix it up! Try using large chart paper to make your notes. How will you fill that space? A central bubble with sub-ideas radiating outward? A time-line type of flow chart? A variety of boxes with different topics? Deciding HOW you're going to fill the chart paper, and with what, is where the learning takes place. And don't let yourself use more than one piece of chart paper, if possible. Giving yourself that limit makes you have to decide what is most important, and, again, that's learning. Don't forget to use colour-coding and include diagrams.

Note: If you fold chart paper carefully, it will reduce down to 8 1/2 X 11" and you can slide your carefully created notes into a page protector, to be pulled out again at the final exam.

Tool #9: Use Your Body

[Reading time, including videos: 30 minutes]

Research has demonstrated that we learn better when we use as much of our body as possible. Do you remember "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"? Yes, it is a children's song, but it is intended to be a memorization strategy for babies and toddlers to learn part of the bodies. There is even a language teaching method created after that theory: it is called Total Physical Response (TPR) and it really works, although someone might think it looks a bit clownish. 

"But I am not learning any language now, I thought this post was about memorization strategies for my classes!", you may say. The key is that you can use this approach for memorizing any piece of information you need or even understand some challenging ideas. How? Well, don't just read your notes (eyes only): talk about the material with classmates or out loud to yourself (ears); make study notes (hands); and even act out some concepts (whole body). You might feel a little silly pretending to be John A. Macdonald standing in your bathroom and delivering an important speech about confederation to your mirror, but you won't forget the experience!

If you want to learn another way to memorize information by using your body, take a look on this Ted Talk. Can you think of some course content for what you could use this technique? 

 

Tool #8: Rhymes, Acrostics & Acronyms

We bring you here three easy and funny strategies to memorize information. It is very likely that you have practiced any of them in the past, just keep in mind that they can be much more helpful than you think. 

If you ever have a problem with some specific words or short sentences, make up a rhyme with it. For instance, in the movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (you can watch the scene above), Hermione remembers the properties of the Devil’s Snare plant with a rhyme: “Devil’s Snare, Devil’s Snare, Is deadly fun, But will sulk in the sun.” 

An acrostic is a funny sentence using the first letters of the words to be memorized. The one above is a helpful one to memorize the order of the planets. In biology, students have used the acrostic “Katy Perry Comes Over For Grape Soda” to memorize Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. 

Acronyms are similar to acrostics but creating one word (instead of a full sentence) made up from the first letters of the items to be memorized. As you can see on the picture above, He IS TIRED is an acronym that helps us to memorize the symptoms of hypoglycemia. If you need to remember something easier, such as the five Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior), you can use the word HOMES. Which is, of course, another acronym. 

By trying these strategies out, you will realize that each of them will work better with a specific type of information. You might not want to create a rhyme to memorize the periodic table (that would be a really long poem!), but you can turn the elements into acronyms. Just give them a try and post a comment on how do you think these strategies can be helpful to you. 

Quick Challenge (For Tool #6): Teach Someone

If you have done this one in class, good job. We hope that you think that teaching a topic is a good way for the roots of knowledge to grow deeper in your mind.

Now you could try it out again. Teach something that you're currently learning. (Before you begin, if want to watch a video or get some more background on the technique, be sure to check out the post for Tool #6.)

Give yourself a set amount of time to prepare a lesson to teach your topic. If it's a small topic, try to teach it in just a minute or two. If it's bigger, give yourself about five minutes to teach it. It's a good idea to keep your teaching to a short amount of time. This will force you to be clear and efficient, using simple explanations.

Now, how did it go? After you do it, why not post a comment below so that others can benefit from your experience. 

Quick Challenge (For Tool #4): Speech-to-Text

The next challenge is based on the Speech-To-Text strategy we talked about on this post. Maybe you would like to read it again before starting the challenge. 

Read the next text aloud so your cell microphone can record it and create a note out of it. Remember that your mic would need you to enunciate in a clear way. Once the note is created, you can read it to find out if there is any discrepancy, typo or any other kind of difference between the original text and the note on your device. 

Charlemagne has been called the "Father of Europe" (Pater Europae), as he united most of Western Europe for the first time since the classical era of the Roman Empire and united parts of Europe that had never been under Frankish rule. His rule spurred the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of energetic cultural and intellectual activity within the Western Church. All Holy Roman Emperors considered their kingdoms to be descendants of Charlemagne's empire, as did the French and German monarchies. 

How did it go? How well did the speech-to-text software work? 

Below you have a second text, this time with scientific terms, so you can practice this activity one more time: 

The Mesozoic era began in the wake of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the largest well-documented mass extinction in Earth's history, and ended with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, another mass extinction whose victims included the non-avian dinosaurs. The Mesozoic was a time of significant tectonic, climate and evolutionary activity. The era witnessed the gradual rifting of the supercontinent Pangaea into separate landmasses that would move into their current positions during the next era. 

How did it go the second time? How might this Learning Tool help someone?

Tool #7: Go-to Websites for Difficult Topics

To get more information on a topic, or an additional lesson to help you understand a tough concept, check one or more Go-To Websites. You may already know KhanAcademy.org, which is a must. This website has literally thousands of short teaching videos on every math and science topic imaginable. Type the title of the chapter or chapter sub-heading you're working on in math or science into the search field. Salman Khan teaches using a digital blackboard, and he's very clear and natural-sounding (he doesn't read from a script). You can take notes from his mini-lessons, which are usually 5 to 10 minutes in length, and pause the video or rewind as necessary.

There are plenty of other popular e-resources, such as SparkNotes (a website with more than 500 study guides about Shakespeare and English literature, plus history, math, biology and more) or NASA for Students (the educational website by the American space agency). If you feel like you want to try different websites, take a look here to find a list of 200 free Educational Resources categorized by subject (Free Audiobooks, Art, Geography, History, Maths, Science...) 

Sometimes you will also find yourself searching for ideas on any essay you have to write. If that is the case, TED Talks are an excellent source of inspiration. With almost 3000 short talks (and counting!) on multiple topics, it is very likely that you will find ideas for creative essays. As an example, you can watch the video below, which is a TED Talk delivered by Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy.  

Last but not least, keep in mind that not all online resources are equally reliable. Some teachers, for instance, would recommend Wikipedia, but others will not since anyone can edit wiki pages. The Internet is the most amazing tool ever created to search for some information, but sometimes it is possible to find false information or, more frequently, information that is not objective enough.

What is your experience with online resources? Let us know with a comment about your favorite Go-To Websites and how you usually take advantage of them!

Tool #6: Teach Someone

The contemporary American poet Matthea Harvey once said Teaching is a great way to keep learning and we can't agree more. Ask any teacher you know: they will tell you that they learned much more about their subjects by teaching them. 

It makes sense, right? When you study something you have to find a way to insert that information into your head. A way that works for you. But when you teach someone else, maybe that person would need some extra clarification from your side to understand that information. She would ask you questions about it that you might've never asked yourself, but now you have to answer them. And by doing that, that piece of information is getting absorbed into your mind in new, different ways. You can picture that process like the information being a tree that grows its multiple roots deep into your mind.  

So, if you don't learn something until you have to teach it to someone else...well...become a teacher. If you have the opportunity, teach someone a concept you’ve been studying: a classmate, a younger sister or brother, a parent. Encourage them to make questions and try to answer them in the best, simplest way. If you don’t have someone to teach, teach to an imaginary person. Try to do it out loud, if you can. 

Do you have a situation where you could teach something you're studying to someone? Who? Which course? 

Tool #5: Loci Method, or the "Memory Palace"

You might have watched BBC's "Sherlock" starring Benedict Cumberbatch. If so, you might have wondered how Sherlock can memorize such a huge amount of random data. Well, there are some episodes in which he mentions that his brain is like a Mind Palace, as it happens in the video below. 

This may sound just like a funny line, but it actually comes from a memorization technique called the Loci Method, developed in Ancient Greece. That means that you can "Sherlock" your studies by using this technique. With the Loci Method you imagine a route or set of locations that is very familiar to you (for example, the route you walk to school), or the floor plan of your house or other building you know well (these are called "memory palaces"). Take the information you need to memorize, and “locate” it on this familiar path – in your mind (and even on paper, if it helps). Perhaps you put the photosynthesis diagram you have to remember in your south-facing living room window, and the atomic model on the kitchen counter. Have fun imagining where all the information is located. The crazier the image you create, the more memorable it will be. Click on the video below to better understand how the Loci Method works. 

Tool #4: Speech-to-Text

Do you ever find that when you talk about something, you seem to grasp it better, and that you understand stuff more than you thought you did? Are you the type of person who speaks a lot better than you write? 

As you probably know, most smartphones now include the speech-to-text keyboard so you can convert your speech to words on a page. That feature might be an easy way to text your friends, but have you ever thought of including it as an additional tool for your study time? You could use it to write an email message, brainstorm ideas for a writing assignment, record short summaries of what you've been reading -- any number of things. The more you use the microphone keyboard, the better it gets at recognizing your voice. And the text can be used to create an essay outline, study notes, or the rough draft of a written assignment.

When you use speech-to-text to summarize your reading, you'll find that you'll remember it better. To challenge yourself and try this tool out, click here. 

If you like this tool, you might also be interested in more sophisticated software for these purposes, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking or the smartphone app called Dragon Dictation, which can also be used to convert your speech to words on a page. There are so many available options these days, some of them even for free. 

Tool #3: "Cheat" sheet

A "cheat" sheet is a reference sheet or formulas sheet we are allowed to use during an exam to help memory. Even if you’re not allowed to use one, make a "cheat" sheet for an upcoming evaluation such as a math test. Confine yourself to both sides of an 8½” X 11” sheet of paper. On it, outline briefly the different types of problems that you will be asked to solve on the test, and the steps and formulas you need to know for each. Then, memorize the "cheat" sheet as best you can. (Actually, because making a "cheat" sheet is so involved, you'll find you memorize it easily. That is why "cheat" sheets would also fit under the Memorization Tricks category). The video below is a good example of how to create a "cheat" sheet from scratch, although yours wouldn't need to be that ambitious. 

Also, as you can see below, some people even create their "cheat" sheets on Microsoft Word or any other word processor.

Here's a related idea. Before you start a test, actually before even looking at the test, quickly write out everything you remember from your "cheat" sheet, especially formulas, and that way you will have it to refer to during the writing of your test. Just remember to inform your teacher beforehand about your plan, so they don`t think you are cheating!

Tool #2: Colour-Coding

Do you always use pencil or blue pen to make your notes? Do you have a gorgeous set of coloured gel pens that sit idle? Use colour to make your notes. First, colour improves your learning because you have to decide which colour to use for which concept. For goodness’ sake, don’t use colour to make your notes pretty! The colours you use should represent different categories . . . and whenever you force yourself to categorize the material that you’re studying, you’re learning it! Second, colours are far more memorable than a monochromatic set of notes. Try it and see!

Do you wonder about the best tips on how to color-code your notes? Click here then to find some of them. 

Tool #1: Turn Variables into Little Pictures

In order to memorize a complex formula, try converting some of the variable symbols into little pictures. For the y variable, for example, you could draw a little cat face with its tail hanging down. The x variable could be an x superimposed on a pair of lips, to represent a kiss. The delta sign (∆) could be drawn as a house with a triangular roof. For that matter, assign a colour to different operations (e.g., pink for multiplication, blue for division, etc.) and then always use those colours when writing out a formula you have to memorize. Pictures and colours will be easier to memorize.

Do you want another example? Let's pretend then you want to learn Japanese. One of the first things you would have to do is getting used to read hiragana, a Japanese syllabary in which every character corresponds to a syllable. The image below is just one of many different possible ways to memorize the character き (ki): in this case, turning it into a picture of a key, since both words sound exactly the same.

Here is another example of how to turn the Pi number (π) into a Py-thon.

Do you feel like you are ready to create your own "designs"? OK, let's get started then: just choose any symbol you use in Math or Science (eg. root square, y, Σ) and turn it into a picture. It doesn't matter if the picture makes no sense to other people--remember that this is a memorization trick that should work for you!