Basic ways to make associations of what you know and don't know

News happenings on August 16

1948 Monday - Babe Ruth dies.
1954 Monday - Sports Illustrated begins publishing
1958 Saturday - Madonna born
1962 Thursday - Ringo Starr replaces Pete Best as Beatle's drummer
1977 Tuesday - Elvis dies
1985 Friday - Madonna weds Sean Penn
1986 - Saturday - Madonnas "Papa don't Preach" is no. 1 hit
1988 - Tuesday - IBM introduces software for artificial intelligence

     There are tricks to memorizing trivia as well as important things for your job and school. If you look at this example there are three things about Madonna on August 16. Her birthday, her wedding, and her No. 1. hit. Some information just lends itself to easy memorization. To remember this all you would have to memorize are the years that the Madonna event occurred on August 16, and if you are like me, the day of the week.
      When I was in high school our sanitation engineer ( back then we called them janitors, oh that sounds so seventies) was Mr. Les Trash. Can you see how his name made for an easy association with his occupation? However, most things you need to memorize do not lend themselves so easily to association, so you need to create one.
       Since the olympics just ended here is an example of how I memorized what olympics were on which years. I would use pictures and souns to associate the city with the year.

1896 - Athens - Well that was easy because they were the first modern olympics.
1900 - Paris - I thought of a state senator and a baseball pitcher I knew who were born in that year and imagined them eating in a cafe in Paris. THey were Hugh Scott and Lefty Grove
1904 St. Louis - I knew that Bing Crosby was born in 1904 I imgined him singing "Meet Me in St. Louis"
1908 London - Lyndon Johnson ex president was born in 1908. I imagined him climbing Big Ben.
     I continued this through all the olympics through 1964 Tokyo. Beginning in 1968 I did not have to associate because I rember the games from watching them.
     In future bologs I will illustrate specific ways of making associations.