There was a show I loved watching growing up, Drake and Josh, a comedy about two high-school age students who couldn’t be more different. Drake was a guitarist who played in a cool rock band, got all the girls, and didn’t care about school. Josh was an honor student who was socially awkward, and often was bullied by the jocks for being so nerdy. They were forced to live with each other and become brothers when their single parents married one another, and they soon became very close and helped each other work on what they weren’t so good at.
There was a great episode where Drake was in danger of failing Chemistry class which would cause him to repeat a year, and his only hope of passing was Josh tutoring him. This was not an easy task; Drake couldn’t grasp the material and kept wanting to play guitar instead. That’s when Josh realized, he should teach him in the way he best understands! He started relating chemistry concepts to different sounds he could play on guitar; atoms were like single notes, and chords were molecules. Soon Drake had his own way of learning the material, and he ended up passing the class.
This was always a cool concept to me and I actually ended up using a similar method throughout school. I was a math major and I was great at solving equations and found it fun; I realized I was good at memorizing patterns and numbers. What I was not good at however, was history and social studies class. Even when it was something I was interested in, like Martial Arts history, I still couldn’t get it to stay in my head. I always joke, I studied math because I’m good at numbers, not words. What I ended up doing is anytime I had to memorize some sort of history, I thought of it in my head like an equation. I can recite facts about Grandmaster Shin and the World Tang Soo Do Association this way; I know “November 13-14, 1982” comes after the words “The Charter Convention was held in”. I also would create acronyms to memorize certain things, or relate it back to numbers. For our 14 attitude requirements, I realized #2 has 2 words, #3 has 3 words, #4 has 5, #5 has 6, and #6 has 4. That has stuck with me since I was 16!
Turns out Drake, Josh, and I are not the only ones who do this either, in college I read an article about how to study more efficiently and it suggested thinking of the content as something you like. They used the example of a sports team; if you’re passionate about sports you probably have a lot of the players memorized, know random facts about the game, or even know your favorite teams statistics and history. The article explained that you can experiment using the same parts of your brain you use for your sports information, for memorizing material you needed to learn. Relate the players to historical figures, the statistics to equations, anything to help the information be easier to digest. Try it out sometime and see if you benefit from it as much as I did!
