“Who discovered the electron?” my brother asks as we study for our chemistry test.
“All I remember is that it starts with a J, but it’s just a name and a word. How are we supposed to memorize the association if it means nothing to us?”
He cleverly responds: “J.J Thomson discovered the electron. Okay so you know how J.J Abrams created Lost and people felt NEGATIVELY toward the finale? That will help with the ‘J.J.’ part. Also, Ms. Thompson (our Spanish teacher) watched Lost so that will help you mentally get to the ‘Thomson’ part.”
“Nice. Wait, how do you know Mrs. Thompson watched Lost?”
“I don’t, but now that association is stuck in your head and will never be “lost.”
This is how we studied. Having experienced almost everything in our lives together, studying with my brother was almost at times…well…fun. We came up with absolutely ridiculous ways to remember concepts and facts. Boring memorization tests became fun challenges at associating two completely different things. My twin brother and I had taken the same classes since we were in Pre-school so we had been used to studying together for everything. We would even grade each other’s papers, writing “LOL” over silly grammar mistakes and jokingly writing a big, fat “F” on the bottom of every essay with a tiny real grade in parenthesis. In this way, academics became as fun as possible. Sure, we would stress about studying and test-taking, but we had each other to plan study schedules and quiz one another until we had mastered every material that came our way. We stood on stage at graduation as co-valedictorians, proud of ourselves for pushing each other and laughing about our competitiveness; if I had gotten a 99 on a test and he had gotten a 100, silent treatment would have defined the car ride home.
Flash forward a year and I’m stressed about academics and having no one to turn to for studying or simply planning out my workload. Even though we both attend the same university, we took different major paths. College can be very frantic as going to class, maintaining a social life, eating healthy, working out, and getting enough sleep is a lot to manage. Sprinkle in an essay here and a midterm there with a few drops of homework and a casual hefty book to read. Without my brother to co-manage the monsoon of responsibilities, I am left utterly alone, waiting for the impact of failure to consume me. I decide to look for other sailors to help me out of this monsoon. Maybe I can come up with silly ways to remember psychology terms with someone else. Fail. I spend more time trying to find universal ways to remember concepts or memorize words than I do absorbing the information. This clearly isn’t working. However, I know that the sense of academic determination that we fostered together in high school was still alive within me. I can still make stilly ways to remember things on my own and learn to quiz myself.
I know most people reading this are not a twin or have never looked at studying as something that could ever be fun. I hesitate using the word, “fun,” as I reflect on painful hours of studying for Calculus, Chemistry, and AP tests. Those moments were not always fun per say, but they weren’t as stressful when you have funny ways to remember and learn. My advice to anyone who is struggling to find motivation, experiencing senioritis, or about to give up all hopes of ever acing a test is to change your study habits. Don’t make learning a complete bore because why would you chose to study when there’s a world of Netflix, social media, and texting at your fingertips, aiming to lure you into their distracting lairs? Resist the temptation by creating silly associations, looking up funny YouTube videos about the topic at hand, or making up games to help you study. After all, the nerdiest of topics, such as the discovery of the electron, can be yanked from the dry world of chemistry and placed in an everyday context. I urge you to make the boring topics your own reality and find opportunities to laugh, rather than cry, about your next test.