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.