My friend learned the names of the most common wildflowers in Colorado and wouldn’t you know, he said once he knew their names, he saw them everywhere.
Holy CRAP this is useful! I've found it terribly hard to locate any advice for making a memory palace with kids; this may be the single most helpful guide about that on the internet.
Moreover, it's gotten my curriculum-crafting wheels spinning. I have a whole approach to structuring the history curriculum (losttools.substack.com/p/spiral-history), but one of its tensions is that it doesn't include any nation-specific stuff. I can imagine that memorizing the presidents at the beginning of one's education could serve as a "seed crystal" to much more knowledge of American history. (Like, when your kids learn about the Great Depression, you could help them imagine an old-timey hobo leaning on the swingset in the park across the street.)
A question for you: American presidents serve more-or-less fixed terms, so a list of presidents serves as a good "spine" for everything else. That's less true of other countries — English PMs and French présidents can last forever, or drop quickly. If one is looking for "spines" to connect more history, do you have any notions about what they might pick?
You are exactly right. Start with presidents and then tie stuff from American history onto each presidents location.
We are doing this now for US history. I haven’t started my EU history plan for this yet but I know how I will do it.
I’m doing English/British monarchs starting in 1000 AD. Unlike presidents that get one room per president we are upping the difficulty and doing one room per 20 years - so five rooms per century.
Some monarchs get more than one room. Some rooms get more than one monarch. And it doesn’t give you exact years of the monarchs but it gives you when they start and end within about 20 years. I’ve mapped it out and it works pretty well I think. But I haven’t made it operational yet.
It also involves using new methods for numbers. There are repeating president names but given their locations you aren’t going to mix up LBJ and Andrew Johnson. But you need a way to know who is Henry I vs III vs V vs VIII, etc.
After we have operationalized it will likely write a post on it assuming I get it to work.
My friend learned the names of the most common wildflowers in Colorado and wouldn’t you know, he said once he knew their names, he saw them everywhere.
I read about pegging images to information from the book, "The Art of Memory" by Yates. Maybe I should figure out where it went! 🤔
Holy CRAP this is useful! I've found it terribly hard to locate any advice for making a memory palace with kids; this may be the single most helpful guide about that on the internet.
Moreover, it's gotten my curriculum-crafting wheels spinning. I have a whole approach to structuring the history curriculum (losttools.substack.com/p/spiral-history), but one of its tensions is that it doesn't include any nation-specific stuff. I can imagine that memorizing the presidents at the beginning of one's education could serve as a "seed crystal" to much more knowledge of American history. (Like, when your kids learn about the Great Depression, you could help them imagine an old-timey hobo leaning on the swingset in the park across the street.)
A question for you: American presidents serve more-or-less fixed terms, so a list of presidents serves as a good "spine" for everything else. That's less true of other countries — English PMs and French présidents can last forever, or drop quickly. If one is looking for "spines" to connect more history, do you have any notions about what they might pick?
You are exactly right. Start with presidents and then tie stuff from American history onto each presidents location.
We are doing this now for US history. I haven’t started my EU history plan for this yet but I know how I will do it.
I’m doing English/British monarchs starting in 1000 AD. Unlike presidents that get one room per president we are upping the difficulty and doing one room per 20 years - so five rooms per century.
Some monarchs get more than one room. Some rooms get more than one monarch. And it doesn’t give you exact years of the monarchs but it gives you when they start and end within about 20 years. I’ve mapped it out and it works pretty well I think. But I haven’t made it operational yet.
It also involves using new methods for numbers. There are repeating president names but given their locations you aren’t going to mix up LBJ and Andrew Johnson. But you need a way to know who is Henry I vs III vs V vs VIII, etc.
After we have operationalized it will likely write a post on it assuming I get it to work.