Singin' in the Classroom by Anna

Singin' in the Classroom by Anna - January 2014 Scholarship Essay

In elementary and high school, I often had trouble studying for tests using textbooks. I usually had a good grip on the topics covered in lecture, but I struggled with the information we were supposed to read on our own. It was too dry and I couldn’t attach the isolated facts with anything that would help me to remember them. It wasn’t until I took Spanish during my sophomore year that I found a method that really helped. My Spanish teacher was really into using songs to remember the vocabulary, which I found extremely annoying at first. However, when I was doing my homework one night, I found myself humming the most obnoxious song – the song my Spanish teacher had used to teach us the names and capitals of all the Spanish-speaking countries. Just before I started banging my head against the wall to get rid of the offensive song, a light bulb went off in my head. If this annoying Spanish song about countries and capitals could get stuck in my head, couldn’t a song about, say, prepositions get lodged in there, too? And there began my songwriting career. Well, if writing not-very-clever songs to other people’s music counts as songwriting, that is.

It was too time consuming for everything, of course, but if I was struggling with a specific piece of information, I would make up or learn a quick, silly song to remember it. I rapidly learned that the more annoying the song was, the more likely I was to remember it. The more I hated the tune, the better. It didn’t take long for me to turn into a music masochist, torturing myself day and night with songs that drove me absolutely insane. And yet, I felt more and more confident while taking tests.

I found this especially helpful with science, because all I had to do was sing the taxonomic classifications to the tune of a popular song, and I never forgot it, and probably never will! My belief that this was a good way to study was confirmed when I took Psychology. Since it’s the study of the mind, one of the first things we learned was memory tactics, and putting facts to a tune was one of the tips my professor gave us! Also, math professor at my community college also used this technique to help the class remember the quadratic formula (to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”, no less!).

Even though it sounds like a silly and childish method of learning facts, I definitely found it helpful throughout my high school years, and my first year of college. My classmates may or may not have thought that I was absolutely insane, because I had an obnoxious tendency to softly hum during tests. Although I never had a chance to test this out, if anyone ever had told me I was crazy, I would have said, “Oh, yeah? Tell that to my GPA”. Unfortunately, I doubt that I could have pulled a line like that off without laughing at myself, but it was amusing to imagine. Don’t worry, I’ve learned to cut the humming down drastically!