( From MFL Music Mania youtube channel, featuring the song Carolina by the band M-Clan)
Musical mnemonics encode information in a ludic way. One of our Maths teachers has adapted songs to assist her teaching; her‘ greatest hits’ include Integrate by Parts( to the tune of Total eclipse of the heart), I will derive( I will survive) and I In-te-grate( YMCA). Songs of such videos go viral in the‘ hive mind’ of online mutual support, and some of her students even make their own‘ tribute’ videos to share in class, of ones that help them the most. Thanks to an American teacher’ s rewrite of La cucaracha, generations of our IB Ab Initio students can recall the infinitives and first-person singular iterations of all the irregular simple past tense verbs.
Finally, we cannot overlook the power of rhyme. In the Latin department, rhymes such as‘-ior means more’ and‘-issi or-erri means very’ help students spot and translate comparative and superlative adjectives. And our Head of Russian empowers his learners with playful gems such as: zavod means‘ factory’…“ there’ S A VODka factory” and zeelyonee means‘ green’…“ ZEE LIONS in zee green jungle”.
The old-fashioned name for mnemonics may be Eselsbruecke or‘ donkey bridge’ in German, and George A. Miller’ s oft-quoted 1956 research may have suggested human typical short-term memory capacity is about seven items, plus or minus two. Yet the proof is in the memory aid pudding, across all ability levels: mnemonics enhance learners’ best practice so they can go beyond this capacity. There is no doubt how useful they are as retrieval aids, boosting marks and making tests less stressful. Students at Sevenoaks and further afield routinely show that they can go far beyond these perceptions of recall and attainment across their many subjects, by enlivening their encoding of academic memory with ingenious, amusing, and evidently unforgettable mnemonics.
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