We all have our individual style of learning and memorizing things for exams. Personally, I do not think I have good study habits as I get distracted pretty easily and lose focus. Heck, I even fit the symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD), but refuse to believe I have it! When I first started college, I used to read entire chapters, but now I just glance at them and read the summaries. What I do pay attention to is the bolded terms and what is around them. I have a rather weird trait in that if my professors test me with multiple choice exams I “almost” always do well. When I read the A-B-C-D answers, the answer just “jumps” at me. Interestingly, I found that HBU pretty much denied me of this lucky ability, forcing me to memorize and really learn material to construct essays and write short answers. So far, it has been the only place in which the bulk of my tests were not multiple choice. I guess most private universities are like that, it does give you an edge. At first, I found it disconcerting, but later it became normal. As you know, learning material that is interesting is rather easy, the hard part is learning material that you really don’t like. For this, I came up with a rather simple way of learning that, while not fool-proof, you can beat memorizing short stories and poems learning half the amount.

For example, I took an advanced English class with Dr. Louis Markos, a brilliant professor of English at HBU, and for our final we had to memorize like 10 rather long poems. The class covered the romantic and Victorian English poets such as Percy Shelley, Samuel T. Coleridge, John Keats, and later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, etc. If you know me, then you know I love literature. Sadly, however, I found most of the poems in this class boring. When finals came around we had to know all the poems covered since mid-term and recognize the author and name of the poem, I panicked! How could I remember stuff that I really didn’t want to read? I came as to the answer after some brainstorming. Simply, take up the poem’s stanzas and just memorize every other line!

I took Thomas Hardy’s Channel Firing:

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

‘That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening….

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!’

And many a skeleton shook his head.
‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Though I shouldn’t have, I transformed it to this:

That night your great guns, unawares,
And broke the chancel window-squares,

And sat upright. While drearisome
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
Jut as before you went below;

‘All nations striving strong to make
They do no more for Christés sake

‘That this is not the judgment-hour
For if it were they’d have to scour

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I ever do; for you are men,

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under

And many a skeleton shook his head.
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,

So, this is how I aced Dr. Markos’ final exam! Instead of memorizing ALL the material, I only memorized half of it! For all intents and purposes, the poem retains its identity and one can easily identify it as Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy! The English professor gave us excerpts of the poems and each excerpt had 4-6 lines, thus, my method allowed for at least 2- 3 lines to fall within the excerpt, more than enough to recognize the poem! Markos seemed impressed that someone wearing a Jack Skellington beanie was able to pull it off! Of course, this technique doesn’t work well with science or math classes, but for some English classes and other humanities… it should work just fine.

When you immerse yourself in literature, you begin a journey that will lead you to the greatest writers that have walked the earth. Their degree of greatness will vary according to how much their work impacts you and, as such, I was awestruck by the works of Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes. Born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau was and is one of the most important people you may not have heard of, but whose importance was paramount to us all. Educated at Harvard University, Thoreau refused to pay five dollars for his diploma and, nonetheless, embarked on a life in which he would become a writer, poet, abolitionist, philosopher, and transcendentalist. That last one is a mouth full; transcendentalism was a movement of protest against society and common culture with new intellectual ideas in religion, literature, and philosophy. It is said that Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of my heroes, started this movement and Thoreau and others joined later.

Walden and Civil Disobedience are Thoreau’s greatest works. I urge people to give them a shot, they are the works that influenced the people that you do know, like the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, the practitioner of satyagraha, Mahatma Gandhi, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. In his essay, Civil Disobedience, Thoreau argues what many feel today: “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”-things that would eventually even lead him to prison on one occasion. In Walden, he is a naturalist and writes about personal independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual finding, and guide for self reliance. Thoreau lived by himself in a cabin and tested simple living, isolating himself from society to get a better understanding of it. The following are Thoreau quotes from both works I mention:

“Things do not change; we change.”

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

“Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

“If misery loves company, misery has company enough.”

“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

Hope you enjoyed them.