On Learning, and then some

Megs:

How easy it is - to tell oneself: "Alright, now I am going to sit down, and start poring over all of last semester's worth of notes for optom171A [Structure and function of the visual system]," read about 6 pages worth of lecture handouts, absorb about 2, and get distracted.

Productively, though, I made up some songs as mnemonics to help remember some of the stuff. Aren't they great? I wonder how fast a textbook would sell, if it was written not by some old guy with a million letters denoting his qualifications after his name, (eg. Dr. S. Ape Sapiens, PhD, MBCHB, S-thingPsych ABCDEFG)** - but by a [well-achieving] student who could communicate in effective slang exactly in what sort of cheeky ways we could learn/memorise/remember half the crap we're meant to know, before and after exams.

Maybe it's a terrible way to learn things, but at least (some of it) works. I still remember one I learnt last year for the paper POPHLTH111 (Epidemiology to you):

C T I E B C E C. It stood for Can Tim Isolate Everyone, Because Chris Eats Children.

And it was supposed to stand for all the things you have to consider before the implementation of health policies. I remember T stood for "Time", E stood for "Ethics", B stood for "Benefits", and one of the Cs stood for "Cost". I haven't thought about this in a year so I'll try and remember what the others stood for later.

I know of cruder mnemonics, such as the one for remembering the twelve cranial nerves.
The letters are O O O T T A F A V G V. Some of them are rude! And, "because classy sophisticates like us shouldn't stain our lips with cursing," you can look them up yourself xP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mnemonics_for_the_cranial_nerves

Hmmm I have to go, lecture in 47 minutes and I'm still at home. I'll post an update of what I've been up to in the holidays/my current interests-and-hobbies later, I guess.

**NB: I have huge respect for these people. Really. In fact had we but world enough, and time I would probably want to study a million things too. I don't know how people with a million degrees do it!