I think there is a blog post in here somewhere

(I'm listening to the debate as I am writing this post. I'm not sure that this will be a good idea as I am not good at multi-tasking to begin with, and when I feel the need to say bad words as I listen, well, this may need to be a post I edit before I post. But before I go on, can I just comment that it is not our beyond our capabilities to silence a person's mike when it is not their turn to talk.)

Anyway...

I was talking to a friend and she commented that she was curious to see how I was eventually going to connect Ancient Greece with chemistry, our two unit studies, as I was mentioning that I like finding connections between what we are studying. It was also this same friend who sent me a text a couple of weeks ago saying I needed to read a book. This friend and I share very much the same taste in books, so when she says I should read something, I put it on my hold list at the library.

(Can we say bully? Being talked over is a personal pet peeve, and boy is he pushing my every last button.)

Let's (try) to talk about this book, which is also the same one I read over the weekend. This was the book I read cover to cover and hadn't already started. I actually read it in about 24 hours because I found it so fascinating. The book is, Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History by Lynne Kelly.

Initially I wasn't terribly excited because I have read about memory palaces before, but this book put them in such a different light as well as talking about they way indigenous people used memory systems to record their culture as well as all of their scientific knowledge. The book which I remember the best from college was one I read my freshman year in an ethnomusicology class. I was totally lost as to what we were doing, but we read a book called Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord. I'm still not entirely sure why we read it, probably it was explained but I missed it, but it was fascinating. It was about how the bards, such as those who would tell the stories of the Illiad and the Odyssey would do so from memory, and then went on to explain how this could have been possible. The idea of someone being able to hold that much in their heads and being to recall it was amazing to me. 

(Oh my goodness. This is not a debate. This is aggravating chaos which is infuriating. 45 was directly asked to condemn white supremacists and the proud boys and HE WOULD NOT DO IT!!)

Are you still here? Back to the book about memory from the weekend. I felt the same way about this book as I did about Singer of Tales... just overwhelmed by the capabilities of our brains to remember things. I've now reserved her other book because I think she deals more with indigenous people than in this book which deals with her personal experiments in using these various memory methods.

(I'm sorry, but if you continue to say untruths over and over and over and over in a rude and brazen way, it still does not make them true.) 

Where am I? I'm not entirely sure. I think I was heading towards connections. The author's personal experiments with memory palaces inspired me to try creating one, but I decided that it would be more interesting to teach my children to create a memory palace at the same time. What about if we created a memory palace in order to memorize the periodic table? 

(News flash: The forests are full of leaves. Leaves cause fires. Just in case you didn't know or weren't sure about how these things work. [insert whatever heavy sarcasm emoticon you like here]

Now some of you may be wondering what the heck a memory palace is. It is a method for memorizing information based on location. Our neurons, when information is taken in together, get wired together. So that when you see one thing, it will often trigger another memory that the particular place or object reminds us of. The idea with memory palaces is that a person uses a place that is known to remember other information. This is a very simplistic version of what it is and what you can do with it.

(I have never wanted to send another adult to their room and think about their bad behavior as much as I do now.)

After my idea about using a memory palace to memorize the period table, what do I discover several pages later? A description of how the author used these techniques to help a class memorize the periodic table! She added in some other ideas which I hadn't considered. I love it when I can use someone else's experience and not have to make something up from scratch.

("They've [I'm always highly suspicious of undefined uses of 'they'] found ballets with 45's name on it in creeks and all over. It's a disaster." Oh, please. Creeks? Really? I'll start checking mine.)

So we started this morning, adding the first six elements to our memory palaces. It was not an overwhelmingly successful venture. My children were having a little difficulty wrapping their heads around what it was we were doing standing in the front hall trying to figure out how to link a chemical element. By carbon (C6), things were starting to come a little bit together. A little bit. I think it will start to make more sense the farther we get and the more they can remember. I hope. 

(Thank goodness that is over. I'm not sure I can listen to the rest. And I would just like to point out that at no point, at the end, did 45 ever agree that he would not incite his followers to violence if he does not win.)