hi this is frank buck and this is the place to be if you want to get organized and make it look easy today we're going to talk about how i memorize 57 pages of notes in one day life presents situations that we've never faced before and those situations cause us to grow it starts the day we breathe our first breath and if we're lucky it doesn't end until we breathe our last one well i want to tell you about a class i had in college it was called school and society if you were an education
major at jacksonville state university during a certain time period this class school and society taught by dr harry rose was unforgettable dr rose was an amazing storyteller at 7 30 a.m he could keep a room full of college students spellbound hung on every word he said and he did it without ever looking at a set of notes everything was from memory he was preparing the next generation of educators and he was the very model of what excellence in teaching looked like while dr rose never used notes you were taking your own and plenty of them
the class was fast paced and as the first weeks rolled by i saw the number of pages in my notebook grow and all the while i was wondering one question when's the test well class meeting after class meeting came and went with no mention of a test and then finally the day came when dr rose announced the date of this event and he told us that this test would consist of one question and when he gave us examples of questions from past tests it became painfully obvious that a general knowledge of the material would not
be enough to really be prepared i would need to be able to recite all of my notes from memory from beginning to end or jump in anywhere in the middle and start discussing from there i counted the pages there were 57 of them and the information was pretty detailed nothing in my past had prepared me for what i was about to face now i'd always been good at memorization but nothing like this so introducing the concept of places that magical memory aid you see i ran across a little paperback entitled the memory book and that
book began with a discussion of memory systems used throughout history it took only one page to give me what i needed it was a pro an approach that worked not only on that test but on every exam that i faced through every collegiate program the authors talked about a technique used by the ancient romans and greeks orators back in those days delivered these long speeches from memory and so the orator prepared the speech by associating each part of their house or some other building that they were familiar with with parts of the speech so the
first point in the speech might be associated with the front door and the next point with the foyer etc and so then as the orator delivered the speech he would just simply take this mental trip through his house talking about each room as he came to it well this technique was called places and it's from this early memory technique by the way that we get the current day expression well in the first place that's where it started well i read no further than that one page because i had everything i needed to know so starting
at the beginning of those 57 pages i began associating each major topic with a room i visualized certain people in that room and discussed at uh you know discussed at that point in my notes immediately placed pictures and posters on the walls each reminding me of the details about that topic and when i was said and done i could literally recite the entire 57 pages as i mentally walked through each room now i was ready and it took me one day but i did it now let me show you what i'm talking about here is
the notebook that i still have from 1980 and this is what a typical page would look like everything in a logical outline form here's a closer example now let's zoom in on the left margin as i'm memorizing these notes i'm thinking about the house where i grew up and mentally picturing the notes being played out as a story as i walk from room to room i'm imagining certain people from my notes in that room history notes are always full of lists you have five reasons for this and seven causes for that so i'm imagining posters
on the wall with those lists and from these 57 pages uh well i ran out of rooms before i got to the end so i started using the studios in the classrooms in the music building where i spent most of my time at the university and then continued to the church that i attended during my college days well all the while i'm making notes in the margins about the story that i'm creating and then i just study the story the one question test required me to discuss the history of american education from its beginnings to
the point where our class discussions had stopped that material just happened to be the final 10 pages of my notes so i was able to jump to that part of the story and start talking about the rooms i was going in and the people i was seeing and the posters on the wall and i did it and i made an a on the test i made an a in the class while we're on the subject of note taking not every class is going to lend itself to outline form in a particular class i took a
very excellent class on adolescent psychology what worked was first of all taking notes as a draft just like i i talked about before but then when i would redo these notes that afternoon i transformed them into a series of questions and answers questions were in red and answers were in blue so back to the test i not only made an a but more importantly i had a technique that never failed i was delighted to have found something so simple that made such a huge difference and maybe just maybe it could make a difference for you
as well if you missed that last video the one on taking notes for college students it's uh here on the right you can click and view that one while you're here subscribe to the channel for more videos that will help you get organized and make it look easy this has been frank buck thanks for spending this time with me
