The Mnemonics Gene, Fifth-Grade Drama, And Some Lessons From Outdoor Science School

This week the most extraordinary thing happened. Beatrice was studying for a geography test, filling in a blank map of the United States, and her dad sent me a video of her memorizing all the states’ names and locations by reciting a long, convoluted mnemonic device that included lines like “Kansas isn’t where you think it would be because it starts with K, an unexpected letter.”

This is exactly what I do.

I wrote about a few of my mnemonics on my long-defunct blog:

While driving a car, in order to remember which pedal is the brake and which is the gas: “So, you know how when you use your turn signal, up is right, like up, towards God and heaven, and the right hand of God, and left is down, away from God? So you’d think that with the gas and the brake, the brake would be on the right, and the gas would be on the left, since the brake is better than the gas. But it’s the opposite of that, because driving is hard.”

While entering my credit card into an online form, in order to remember whether a certain digit is a 6 or a 7: “You know how you always want a number to be a 7 when it isn’t? Except this is the one time you actually want it to be a 6, but then it’s a 7. Life is like that, I guess.”

While washing my hair, in order to remember which decorative container holds the shampoo and which the conditioner: “Pink is for shampoo and orange is for conditioner, which just…