By Sue Murphy
My husband, Harold, is into rock. Yes, back when I was trying to save the world with Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, he was turning up the speakers and blasting Iron Butterfly and Cream, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about rock of the igneous or sedimentary variety.
Harold studied rock…rocks…in college, and there was a great big pile there to learn. A lot went on in the earth’s crust before we arrived at pea gravel and granite countertops. Not only that, but rocks exist naturally in varied shapes and densities and colors and it was important to Harold’s geography professors that he be able to identify every one.
There were so many rocks to remember that Harold made up jingles, little riffs to help him along. The only one I remember is “Fossilitic limestone, dolomite, chert,” but that’s because I was an early childhood major and was charged with remembering rhymes about five little pumpkins and many other characters that miraculously always came in fives.
My job was to undo the damage done by the alphabet song, to convince a group of 5-year-olds that there wasn’t a letter called “Ellamenopee.” This knowledge served them well when they were later told that you put “i before e except after c or when sounded like ‘ay’ as in neighbor or weigh,” – except when that wasn’t true. Weird.
My students would move on to, “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except for February, which has 28 or sometimes 29,” another lesson in the fact that much of life defies being put on a leash.
Still, some of the ditties were helpful. You could remember to build HOMES on the Great Lakes – Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. When taking piano lessons, “Every Good Boy Does Fine” gave you the lines on the music staff and FACE named the spaces, but you had to remember to start from the bottom or you’d be off completely.
Same thing with the colors of the rainbow. Sure, it’s ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet), but do you begin skyward or earthward, and since ROYGBIV doesn’t really mean anything, is it helpful at all?
It happened again in typing class – or now I suppose it’s keyboarding – QWERTY doesn’t really get you anywhere unless you commit it to memory.
People make up memory songs about all kinds of things: plumbing techniques (righty-tighty, lefty-loosey), the names of the planets in our solar system (plus or minus Pluto) and the Periodic Table of Elements. But I caution you to be careful with this tool because, once you’ve committed a ditty to memory, it will come back to you when you least expect it – driving down the highway, lounging at the beach or standing in the center aisle of the grocery store.
Really, that’s where I count on it the most. Of course, the Periodic Table isn’t much help. It’s been a long time since I bought uranium (just joking, FBI friends), but when it comes to shopping for groceries, I try to make a memory word using the first letters of the things I should have written down. Sometimes my memory jogger works, but other times I find myself going up one aisle and down another repeating, “It began with a C…”
School will be starting soon and there will be a lot for the kids to remember, but hey, a jingle here, a ditty there, and it will all work out. Fossilitic limestone, dolomite, chert. Try to forget it. I dare you.
Rock on.
