by Wesley
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That turned into cartoons of today and yesteryear, the ones of yesteryear clearly being superior. That caused me to examine my inner self and admit that cartoons weren’t necessarily better nor more educational when I was a child. This brought me to “the ideal cartoon,â€? which got me thinking about the cartoons that I really did learn from. This reminded me of Schoolhouse Rock, which reminded me that everything I ever learned and stayed in my head was set to a tune.
If you ever want to learn a string of facts, a list, or a poem, the most effective way to do it is to give it a tune and sing it. I am convinced that most of the American population who grew up in the seventies and eighties can spout out the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, tell you what a noun is, and explain how exactly the nervous system works, all thanks to the songs they sang on Saturday morning.
I am a living example of this theory and sometimes I think that these songs take up a lot of wasted space. The names of all 66 books of the (Protestant) Bible are engrained in a folder in my mental hard drive along with myriad Bible verses, all because somebody thought that the best way to make good Christian children was to sing to them. I may not be able to construct a coherent sentence in French, but I will always remember the alphabet and a little ditty that says “je sais l’alphabet.â€? That’ll do me a lot of good at customs at Charles De Gaulle. The ingenious Fräulein Popken was thinking more practically and taught us the “Ich bin Ausländer und spreche nicht gut Deutschâ€? song, so I won’t have any problems in Germany, well, as long as they let me sing to them. I would have never gotten through the first year of music theory in college without the help of Julie Andrews; I learned C, D, E and they used “do re miâ€? (crazy!). And who doesn’t know what it is when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars?
This is not a new concept. My Spanish teacher had the idea of “get the beat.â€? She put rhythms to grammatical concepts to learn them, such as the “subjunctive beatâ€?: “First person singular present tense drop the o change the vowel and con-ju-gate.â€? It worked but it would have been ten times more effective had she put it to music. So this is my advice for you. What is difficult about English? Take it and put it to a song. I still haven’t figured out how to put a tune to all of the irregular verbs or the meanings of modal verbs but it’s worth a try. If my sister could learn all fifty states of the United States and knows Psalm 89, you can learn English verbs. Leonard Bernstein said that “music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.â€? What could be more appropriate for the English language?
_“I have mine and she has hers and he has his, Do you have yours? They love us and we love them. What’s ours is theirs, that’s how it is with friends. And pronouns, you are really friends. Yeah! ‘Cause saying all those nouns over and over Can really wear you down.â€?_
–Schoolhouse Rock
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Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2007-08-09 10:00:00 +0200
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This article made me open my copy of “The Faber Book of Useful Verse” where rhythm and rhyme are used as aides-memoire. The book contains verses such as ‘How to Grow Cucumbers’, ‘How to Exterminate Rats’ and lots of ways to remember the Kings And Queens of England, how many days are in each month etc etc etc.
My favourite mnemonic helps you to remember the value of the mathematical constant ‘Ï€’ or ‘pi’.
If you include the exclamation mark, the number of characters in the words of the sentence gives you the answer.
When I was a student (a long time ago, unfortunately) I had a Latin teacher who taught us the case endings singing every case with rhythm. Nowadays I’m still able to repeat all the songs that I had memorized through this method.
If I had known the success of this way, I would have used it to study a lot of other subjects that in our days I can’t remember as clearly as Latin. For instance, the irregular verbs in English.
Good gracious ! It’s never too late to begin !
forget-forgot-forgotten, sing-sang-sung, ...
It may help to SING the way Neil Diamond SANG “SONG SUNG Blue.”
Besides actual songs, there are sentences, phrases, and even single words.
To read musical notes, specifically in G-clef, just think that EVERY GOOD BOY DOES FINE. That’s E, G, B, D, F (or mi, sol, ti, re, fa) for the lines on the staff, from bottom to top. For the spaces, just remember FACE. That’s F, A, C, E (or fa, la, do, mi). What about the F-clef? And I cannot for the life of me remember what MY DEAR AUNT SALLY was supposed to help me remember, even though I really did have a dear Aunt Sally. Do you remember? Can you refresh my memory?
Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start.
DO: doe, a deer, a female deer
RE: ray, a drop of golden sun
MI: me, a name, I call myself
FA: far, a long long way to run
SOL: sew, a needly pulling thread
LA: la, a note to follow “sew”
TI: tea, I drink with jam and bread
DO: that will bring us back to “doe” oh oh oh
So sang Julie Andrews as Maria.
And the MDAS of My Dear Aunt Sally means Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. When you have an arithmetical problem that involves all those operations, and there are no parentheses to tell you what elements to group together, MDAS is the order you follow.
Hi, everybody,
When I was a child, maybe seven or eight years old, I studied two years of music at the school. The only thing that I remember are the musical notes: DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, SI, DO. But in english, the notes are: DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI, DO. What is the difference?. Si by TI. Has something changed in all these years?. Can somebody explain to me?.
I never used a song to memorize something, but I think that it is a good way to memorize, and also to play, and this is the cause that this type of songs are the stars of the children’s programs at the TV.
Julie Andrews teach the musical notes in “Sonrisas y Lágrimas” (the musical and the movie). I don’t know the original title in english, and when the Moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, we are at the Age of Aquarius (from Hair, a famous musical in the seventies).
Grettings.
Conchi Calvo
I really liked the device to remember Pi. I wish I had known it in school as I no longer have any use for pi.
We did “Every boy deserves fudge” (treble) and “Good boys deserve fudge always” (bass). I don’t know any for the C clef. FACE is typical for treble spaces and “All cars eat gas” was for the bass.
I think that SI is TI in English merely for practical reasons, to vary the letters as there is already an S in sol.
Thanks for comments.
Hi everyobody.
Just another interesting article to read and write down about it.
It is completly true that everything has radicadlly changed in the last few years, so that children nowadays prefer speding their time playing war games in the play station rather than watching cartoons whom can learn from.
I remember when I was a Kid watching cartoons the most of my childhood and enjoying a lot , at the same time I learnt so much from it.
The TV entertaiments we enjoy actually seems to be more appropiate to became a hooligan which stress strongly the slang, different lenguage and bad manners rather than educate properly.
My idea of educating properly the new generation is to combine the new tecnology with the traditional method, both can be prefect.Before our relatives without tecnology got a good manners, respect each othes and learnt very well so now our kids should learn even easier because we have the same chances besides the multicultural, tecnology, etc.
Greetings