New Memory Aids Step One

School and learning, like any task, is a skill that you learn. The more you practice the better you get. But with a handicap practice may not work, or at least not the traditional way people do things.

Because I was half deaf, not for sound but for words, I soon learned to sit in the front row of classes next to the speaker or professor and slightly to his left and he to my left. The left ear or right brain seemed to process better. I always took notes. When we take notes we have to process what is important and think and so note taking helps us remember and later rehearse the subject. Otherwise we tend to only remember trivia. And since I can not recall trivia without notes I was wasting my time if I did not take notes. Note taking was a blessing but still it was too much information to remember and organize in my mind. I had to think of something.

I had the same problem with the text books. Others underlined what they wanted to remember but that was too much information for me. When you do not have much of a memory you have to think of ways to remember. And studying takes tons of memory. I could read but I knew I had to reread the main points more then once or twice or even a dozen times and it was too much information to handle and review. Students underline those points in a book, but I had to break it down into easier sections of less information with more meaning in order to remember things. So I would put a check mark on what I though would be on a test, a check mark circled if it was more important, a check mark with a circle and sun rays coming off of it for main concepts, a small star for facts that could be used for papers, a star with a circle around it if it was of great interest, a circled star with sun rays coming off if it was extremely important, and most important of all a large star for what I liked, and sun rays coming off the star for awesome unbelievable fantastic facts that warmed my heart and excited my imagination. I would put a word by it to categorize a theme or idea it was about. It was those facts that I would review and enter into my papers for classes. But I could not hold that many facts in my mind to organize and to present them in a paper to mold them into the themes I wanted to. I had to think of more.