I was more of a maths-and-science kid in school.
But fate dictated that I would end up taking History as a subject all throughout high school, right up to the finals that determined whether I’d get in to my preferred university or not.
For the first few years of high school, taking History was compulsory. But once we were given the option to drop it, I couldn’t wait to bid it good riddance.
I wasn’t terrible at it, but I wasn’t great at it either. I much preferred subjects that had a straight-forward answer, where you knew exactly whether you were right or wrong.
History was not like that. It also involved tons of writing in short spaces of time, and I was no writer. My handwriting was so bad, my essays just looked like an army of caterpillars dancing at a rave party.
No way out
In the school term before our final two years of high school, we got to choose which subjects we’d study over that time and eventually sit for finals. History was not on my list.
But during a routine conversation with the school coordinator about my subject choices something got lost in translation. I had no idea this had happened, and I turned up to school on the first day back with the word “History” showing its ugly face on my class schedule.
Wait a second.
What in the…
I was gobsmacked. I immediately felt defeated and that I’d already lost control of my finals, even though they were two years away.
I talked to the teachers and coordinator about the mix-up, but the schedules had been carefully arranged to accommodate the subject permutations of 70 other students. They couldn’t change my schedule without messing around with my other subjects, or the schedules of the other 70 students.
I was resigned to the fact that I’d have to put up with History for another two years.
Cue the sad violin music.
As the school year went on, I kept up with the work, paid my dues. I occasionally got a grade that surprised myself, but mostly bumbled along just above the average.
Before I go on, let’s rewind a few years to add some context.
First taste of Super Learning
In my early years of high school, my parents heard about a Super Learning course and signed my siblings and I up for it. My parents were easily sold when it came to spending on education.
The course took place over a number of weeks in some fancy conference centre, complete with corporate grey carpets, fabric-padded walls, and the obligatory free pencil & note pad lined up in front of each seat, waiting eagerly for their new owners to put them to good use.
As you’d expect from a teenager, I attended the class but acted like I couldn’t care less, and that I was only there because my parents paid good money for it.
The truth is, I enjoyed it a lot. Attending that course was a gamechanger for me; it completely changed the way I saw how learning worked.
To be honest, you could probably find 99% of the content in a memory book off the shelf (such as those by Tony Buzan – love him or hate him), but because the course forced us to actively use and practise the techniques with other people in the room, the content really stuck. I still remember a lot of it to this day.
The course taught things like:
- How to easily recall long lists of words, numbers, or objects
- How to learn languages quickly
- How to remember addresses, telephone numbers, and random facts
How the memory techniques work
The long and short of it is, you turn every piece of information into a picture, and then you use your imagination to link these pictures together. The more absurd, grotesque, funny or silly the picture is, the more ‘sticky’ it will be in your memory.
To give a quick demonstration, let’s say you wanted to remember the following shopping list before heading out: eggs, cucumbers, teabags, laundry detergent, AA batteries.
Imagine the following in your mind:
- Picture a fat mother hen that’s about to lay eggs, but instead, she lays some enormous cucumbers. Imagine the hen grimacing at the unexpected ‘fruit’ of her labour. See picture above.
- The cucumbers then come alive and walk over to your kitchen to make themselves a cup of tea.
- They sit around the kitchen table and sip their tea, but to their horror, realise they’re actually drinking laundry detergent. They start burping giant bubbles that fill the room.
- The bubbles pop as they hit the ceiling, and explode into a shower of AA batteries. Hear the rumbling sound as the batteries come crashing to the ground.
Absolute absurdity, but that shopping list is now stuck in your memory.
You practise conjuring up images quickly and linking them up in pairs or chunks, so that recalling one image naturally triggers the next image. Or, if you like, the one before. It’s like a DVD player in your brain – you can start from the beginning or skip ahead to some random point in the middle.
Because the human brain can recall detailed pictures much more easily than words or numbers, you can remember vast amounts of information if you store pictures instead.
There’s plenty of information online about these techniques if you want to read more, but for now let’s get back to the story.
How’s that gonna work?
While the memory techniques were easily applied to other subjects (and made for great party tricks), I used them less frequently over time. I definitely didn’t use them for studying History.
To add some context, our History exam wasn’t the type where you had to regurgitate lots of different facts or historical dates. That’s old school.
The exam questions we had to answer were just one, or at most two, sentences long, for example:
- “Assess the impact of Cold War developments on two non-European new states.”
Or:
- “To what extent was the rise to power of [Hitler/Mao/other ruler] due to personal appeal and ability?”
And then you write.
Ideally, you write a nice, long, legible, well-structured answer supported by lots of facts, examples, and anecdotes, arguing all sides of the coin. Maybe even poke at the premise and assumptions inherent in the question. You never fully agree or disagree with any statement, but instead shoot at it from all angles.
String all the above together with a bit (but just a tiny bit) of your own writing flair in the time limit given and, voila.
It felt like a crapshoot to me. How was I supposed to study for that?
Crunch time
The finals were getting closer. Our teachers focused on two main things to help us prep for the exams.
1. Practising under exam conditions
Firstly, we practised writing answers to loads of past exam questions under time pressure, which our teacher then graded and gave us feedback on. Some periods of History class would start with a one-line question written on the board, followed by silent, frantic writing for 40 minutes.
There was no short-cut to this – at the very least, we had to train up our hand muscles so they wouldn’t cramp up on the day.
2. Studying model answers
Secondly, we spent time reading and discussing model essay answers written either by the teacher or a classmate who managed to submit something that was worthy of wider distribution (i.e. not mine).
To me, going through these model answers was both discomforting and comforting at the same time.
It was discomforting in that I felt like I’d never be able to replicate that standard of an essay, even if I had all the time in the world, a dictionary and it was an open book exam (it wasn’t).
But, it was also comforting to realise that most of the essays loosely followed a similar structure. They had a similar pulse. If I followed the same bare-bones formula for all my answers and threw some meat on it, it won’t be the world’s finest creation but at least it’ll have a head, a tail, four legs and broadly look like an animal. It went something like this:
- Start with an introduction – for ‘do you agree/disagree’ type questions, I’ll agree to some extent but not fully, for reasons to be covered below. For ‘assess the factors’ type questions, I’ll briefly list the factors I intend to cover.
- Add some middle paragraphs – make a point, add some evidence. Make a point, add some evidence. Make a point, add some evidence.
- If have time, include a penultimate paragraph – usually a dumping ground for any points I didn’t have time to cover in detail, but to show they’ve crossed my mind.
- Finish with a conclusion. There are many fancy ways to start a concluding paragraph, but I always just stuck to ‘In conclusion…’
Super Learning in action
By the time we finished the course, we had a file full of these model answers from the teacher.
So, I memorised them.
Not word for word, but I shoehorned the memory techniques from that Super Learning class, and used them to memorise full-blown 500-1000 word essays. I turned each sentence of an essay into a picture, and linked them together in a long chain.
It was hard work – not the memorisation itself, but the process of turning each sentence into a visual prompt that would make sense to me when I recalled it later. I had to create images that enabled me to remember sentences like:
“The Warsaw Pact in 1955 was the USSR’s response to the admittance of West Germany into NATO”.
If only it were as easy as eggs and cucumbers.
I kept at it, and after some time, I could more or less recite entire model answers for a particular question.
The more model answers I committed to memory, the more I noticed common trends. The same examples were popping up here and there. It became apparent that the underlying bank of information, facts, and anecdotes was more or less static – the trick was in how to weave those individual nuggets together so they formed a coherent argument that answered the exam question.
Sometimes, the same piece of information would even be used in favour of an argument in one essay, and then against it in another.
Pick ‘n’ mix
Memorising these answers wouldn’t have been much help if I could only regurgitate them from start to finish, as it was very unlikely that we would be asked the exact same question in the exam.
The beauty of the memory techniques was that I could recall bits and pieces from anywhere in a model answer. It’s like a mental cut-and-paste exercise. I could take just the second sentence of the fourth paragraph in one, the introduction from another, and the closing sentences from yet another. I’d snip the bits I wanted, add some linking words and leave the rest on the cutting room floor.
So, I now had a bank of well-worded sentences, arguments, examples and interesting facts at my fingertips that I could piece together into an essay that answered the question being asked.
The outcome
D-day came, and we sat the final History exams. Yes there were nerves and last minute prayers muttered, but I tried to treat it like another exam practise session. I left it all on the field, aching hands and all.
After a few long weeks of waiting, we received our grades. I scored the highest grade available on the History exam, as well as the two mini-dissertations we had to write as part of the subject requirements.
I can say for certain that I didn’t produce any brilliant masterpieces or polished specimens of historical argument to earn the grade. It was scrappy, but it doesn’t matter. It got me over the line.
Final thoughts
The fairy-tale ending would be to say that I now love History, read books about the Renaissance era when I’m lying on the beach on vacation, and have become a History professor.
Nope.
I studied a maths-based major at university and became an actuary, meaning I pretty much did a 180-degree turn and ran as far away as I could.
The reason I share this story with you is not to offer you a quick fix, or to doggedly advocate the approach I took to tackle the subject. As I said, it was hard, scrappy work.
My point is, life will serve you and your kids things they didn’t ask for, in school, on the playground, or as adults in the working world. The challenges your kids face won’t always play to their natural strengths.
But that’s not an excuse to admit defeat, or to accept mediocrity. We can teach our kids to experience the joy of overcoming something that’s hard for them. They may even have to work unfairly harder than the person sitting next to them to get the same results.
With some determination, a bit of strategy, and a willingness to try different things until something works, our kids can construct an alternative path around the obstacles they face, and pave their own way to the finish line.
Then, they can look back and be proud of what they’ve achieved, and no one can take that joy away from them.
What difficult challenges have you had to hack your way round to overcome?
The featured image is extracted from “Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante” by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An. For the full painting click here.