I think we can all agree that studying is the worst, right? In high school I would have rather done anything else: play music, practice softball drills, or just lay in my bed. Paying close attention in class could only get me so far, and I realized that my grades would not hold if I kept making schoolwork a school-only thing. To save both my sanity and my GPA, I came up with tricks that felt fun and helped to restructure the way I memorized class notes. I still use these today to make sitting at my desk bearable! Here are my top three weirdly successful methods.
- Drawing Memes in Page Margins
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Studies have proven that our brains retain information much better when we assign visuals to words (check out Joshua Foer’s TED Talk “Feats of memory anyone can do”). When I started doodling in my notes, I didn’t realize this is an actual theory. I only knew that drawing dumb caricatures of people was way more fun than writing about them. When I got home from school, instead of rewriting or cleaning up my class notes, I would draw comics in all the empty space on the page. Bullet points on the battle of Chancellorsville shared space with Stonewall Jackson running headfirst into a stone wall (because it was in this battle that he died). A paragraph about atoms sported a cat batting a vocab word with its paw (cations are paws-itive!). I can still visualize some of my favorite drawings, although the notes are lost. Most importantly, drawing word puns never feels like work!
- Singing Through Math Problems
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Drawing worked great for some classes, but math was not one of them. Straight problem repetition did not work either. I needed to engage some other part of my brain. This trick started because I liked to listen to jazz music while working on math problems. I had a library of instrumental songs I memorized and I mindlessly started singing about the problems I was working out on my scratch paper. “Add a/ plus C/ because slope does account for / (0, Y),” could be sung to the tune of Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” My songs were far from pretty and rarely rhymed, but just the act of trying to make the math line up with music made me process the work differently. It allowed me to remember rules and patterns much better. (Although I did catch myself humming during tests more than once!)
- Roast Your Notes
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Some classes I simply hated too much to do anything fun with. Religion (I went to a private school) and biology were both like this for me. Out of sheer frustration, I started talking back to my notes. “Oh yeah, sure, plants photosynthesize because a cell ate bacteria and magically started a new species. That makes sense.” My poor notes were getting the brunt of my pent-up teen angst. Surprisingly though, trash-talking my notes made me excited to read them! I read each line more closely looking for the next line to tear apart. What I did not realize, until I started excelling in biology, was that by finding clap-backs and insults for information, I was thinking critically about it.
I know these are all pretty odd and probably not techniques that should be used in a public space, but if studying isn’t your forte, they can really be helpful! The important thing about all of these tricks is that they take information out of the information and into other thought processes. Studying doesn’t need to be poring over notes for hours. It can be fun and worthwhile if you think outside the box!