Raphael's Fish Gall

Today it rains like the Dickens. When I got up this morning to go to church, it wasn't raining at all. When I finished with church, it was sprinkling a little bit. While I relaxed for half an hour in the dorm room, changing out of my Sunday clothes, it started thundering. Getting here got my legs wet, even though I was wearing my poncho. They are still wet. It is rarely necessary to memorize. Many times, the natural learning process is sufficient to the acquisition of knowledge. There are certain times, however, when memorization is necessary. One might need to memorize a process, a sequence of data, or a set of rules. For example, in middle school, I memorized the location of the countries of Africa. I find memorization easy. When I read a sample of text, I remember all of the important points on one read-through when I am prompted. I’ve been described as one having a photographic memory. I am very adept at the recall of facts, but I am sometimes terrible at remembering where I put my backpack. I don’t like taking notes when I read; it’s distracting to me. It always frustrated me when my evil middle-school English teacher, Mrs. Wesley, would have me write out my thought process and responses to a sample of text. I hated Visualizing, Defining, Generalizing, and Empathizing. Never will I do that to literature again unless forced. I generally memorize material by the use of mnemonics. My favorite way is to take the first letter of each word of a sequence I am to memorize, and substitute new words starting with those letters to make a sentence. For example, to memorize the steps of the engineering problem-solving method I developed the following mnemonic: The PDAs of Governors Calculate Solutions which are then Discussed = Problem, Diagram, Assumptions, Governing Equations, Calculations, Solution Checks, and Discussion. This mnemonic has proved moderately useful; I developed it because I suspected my engineering teacher of a surprise quiz she never gave.