Exercises

Musical Mnemonics

Objective

To help students to learn all those boring things which still have to be learned, such as names and dates.

This may be the freaky fringe of rote learning, but the point of including it is to encourage a degree of creativity into this chore. This may not be the kind of thing you would want to do in class—it might well be experienced as patronising and reminiscent of primary school—but put it on the VLE or make it available on CD, and it becomes something different, and even "fun". I'm suspicious of efforts to make learning fun, as such, but there is no harm in complements and adjuncts to mainstream teaching.

Considerations

Ever since Ebbinghaus' experiments with learning nonsense syllables, it has been clear that people learn things better when they have a meaning. In the ideal world of adult learning, people would just memorise all this stuff from sheer familiarity, just as gardeners remember the names of plants, or we learn the names of people at work. Unfortunately, the taught curriculum often demands that we have to learn stuff without much of a context or a pre-existing structure. So the best thing is to find a structure which will serve, even if it bears little resemblance to the real-world context.

Many memory aids or mnemonic systems rely on visualisation: "Imagine the rooms in your house, and place the objects you need to remember in them..." or sometimes on word association; "Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain" (spectrum). This exercise goes a little further, particularly for those people who allegedly have a principally auditory perceptual learning style.

The great thing about it is that it works if it works and it works if it doesn't, if you see what I mean!

Method

Music is one of the most structured phenomena in our world, and because of this, song lyrics are highly memorable. In them:

• sense
• rhyme
• rhythm
• tune

all come together, reinforcing each other so that if you forget a few words, you are prompted to remember the few possibilities which meet all the requirements. Poetry is almost as good, but without the "tune" channel, of course. So:

• set the students the task of setting the material to music. They can use it as the basis for a new lyric to a song of their choice, or they can make up a new tune for it.
• The cleverest example I know of is Tom Lehrer's "The Elements", in which he sets the names of the chemical elements (as known at the time of writing in 1959) to the tune of "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" by Sullivan (replacing Gilbert's lyrics).
• The interesting feature of this exercise is that even if the students don't succeed in setting the stuff to music, by the time they have wrestled with it for a while, they'll know it anyway!

I'm not particularly musical, but I am assured that this works by someone who is. Since even I find it easier to remember songs than even poetry (and once taught myself Henry Vaughan's "Peace" to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" — "My soul, there is a country/ Far beyond the stars/ Where stands a wingèd sentry/ All skilful in the wars...") I'm prepared to believe him.