Depending on who you are, imagine it's either 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 or 12:00, and you're about to hit the sack. No, not the hacky sack, but your bed. You've been studying your data sheet a good 2 or 3 hours, because the next day an in-class essay awaits you. You feel pretty prepared, with countless discussions and numerous pages of notes under your belt. However, one major component of your studying is keeping you awake past your bed time: the elusive memorable quotes section. Ten phrases, sentences, rhetorical questions that just cannot nestle up and get cozy in your mind. At this point, you feel that your last best hope is to sleep on your data sheet, and pretend your quotes and analysis will drift your brain by diffusion. After all, if you are a biology student, you understand that the lower concentration of quotes is in your brain, and the high concentration is in the data sheet. Naturally, those quotes should slip off of the page and squeeze through your ears and into your brain, to create an equilibrium across the concentration gradient. I mean, it's science.
But sadly, I've tried this and it has failed every time. Yes, that implies that I've tried this more than once. Regardless, there are ways that you can memorize them with ease, or at least more ease than you might have been having. For example, Dominic and I have had great success with turning each quote into a little jingle or tune. If you can make the quote into a short song, in which you emphasize some key words and sing in some obnoxious voice that illuminates some kind of flow in the sentence, than those quotes will come easier to you than the lines from your favorite Ke$ha song. Another classic tip is to shout out random quotes from the book in the middle of unrelated classes. Nothing beats hearing someone yell out "He is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine's family is a betrayal of his own!!!" in the middle of a lesson about integrals. Trying to write them out a few different times for practice actually helps, because you will end up writing them in your pre-writing for the essay any way. Worrying about what other people's quotes are doesn't help though. I don't know where we got this concept that it might be beneficial to read someone else's Data Sheet and confuse ourselves more. Just be confident in your own quotes. And if all else fails, the commons period right before English is prime time. That's how they do it in the big leagues. But really, if you have any success on that whole memorization by diffusion thing, let me know.
1.Excellent shoutout (and you thought turning quotes into songs was dumb! DONT BRING ANYTHING BACK...ITS NOT OUR WAY!)
ReplyDelete4.I can't count
12.As the only AP english kid in my stats class, I can assure you that they simply LOVE me screaming quotes from The Namesake...Decker's a huge fan.
7.7th period commons is for champs only.
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ReplyDeleteChris, I really loved your mention of diffusion in regards to the amount of quotes on our Data Sheets as compared to the amount of quotes in our heads. Although I have never tried the jingle idea, I have used the technique of writing down the quotes multiple times. It has seemed to really help me to memorize the quotes in a efficient and effective manner. I can not say that I have seen AP English 12 students read through other student's Data Sheets, but I have heard students ask other students how many quotes they have memorized. Once again, worrying about someone else's quotes proves to be a waste of time as these students immediately begin to panic that since they memorized five less quotes than the student sitting next to them, they will "fail" the in class essay. I think the best solution is to prepare the night before (using whatever method helps you learn the quotes the best) and then the next day at school, avoid all conversations about quotes and the impending in class essay.
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