I Get It But How Do I Remember? by Shahmeen

I Get It But How Do I Remember? by Shahmeen - January 2014 Scholarship Essay

Do you ever find yourself singing the lyrics to a popular song you hate? Did you have to be taught how to sing happy birthday? Or do you find yourself singing the slogan from a commercial you've seen countless times? What’s interesting about all these things is that you’ve never sat down and taught yourself the lyrics to a popular song you hate, you never took out a library book on how to sing “Happy Birthday”, and you didn’t sit down and study the commercial slogan that you have no trouble recalling. Repeated exposure to these auditory stimuli is what leads to easy recall. You may have heard the poplar song played in stores you went to, on television and the radio. Likewise you heard happy birthday being sung at numerous birthday parties, and you saw the commercial many times before you learned the slogan.

These are all forms of auditory learning; you listened to these auditory stimuli numerous times before being able to recall the information without prompting. With this principle in mind one study tactic that I use is listening to video clips about the material. For instance, when I took Biology and had to memorize biological processes like the cardiac cycle (system of blood flow in the body) I looked up videos explaining the cycle. I watched a few different videos, the benefit to this method was that I was hearing the same information over and over again. Because of that it became easier for me to remember the terms like systole-contraction of heart, and diastole- expansion of heart, that are used to explain the cardiac cycle as opposed to simply memorizing my notes. I used this method to familiarize myself with the terms I needed to know. When I kept hearing the same words over and over again it became easier for me to recall the terms and their meanings on my own without prompting from my notes.

Also, another tactic I used was creating a song about the things I needed to remember, or create a catchy phrase like “Systole was such a silly girl, the sight of any boy made her heart contract” and “ Diastole, providing you with all your heart expansion needs today.” In this way it became almost effortless to remember key terms and their meanings. Though in truth both phrases are nonsense, they do help to trigger what each term means. Otherwise it would be very easy for me to confuse diastole with systole particularly because the two terms sound so similar. But because of the catchy phrases I came up with it became much easier for me to remember what each term meant. In the systole phrase I tried to use the “s” sound as much as possible and in the diastole phrase I tried to use the “d” sound as much as possible to avoid confusion between the two terms.

Different tactics work for different people, but if one doesn’t find it difficult to involuntarily remember song lyrics or learn catchy phrases from repeated exposure then this technique should work. It should be fairly easy for any individual to learn class material from repeated audio exposure of the desired subject. Try it out, ask yourself if you know what systole and diastole mean after reading this essay. No peeking!