The Highest Learning

Chapter 16-The First Secret Meeting (Mind Maps vs. Mnemonics)

Monday's class comes and goes, as does Monday evening. Mr. Hardwick is ready for his Tuesday class, and has brought extra materials for his post class study session he is to have with Suzanne. His performance wasn't quite as good as Friday's, but classes like that can only happen once in a while, when he's really in the groove...Still, a solid 7, very respectable.

The students all leave, except for Suzanne, who stays and is ready for her study session. She's kept her promise not to tell anyone, and she can barely contain herself. She tells Mr. Hardwick how good she was in keeping their secret. "I didn't tell anyone you were tutoring me, just like you asked," she says.

He brushes the comment aside, "Ok, yeah, great...let's get started shall we? Is there certain material you have been struggling with in particular?"

She sits at a desk and he pulls up a seat next to the desk and sits in a backward chair. It is a page pulled straight from the book of his own childhood rebel badass television teacher hero, Mr. Jonathan Turner, from the show Boy Meets World. He does look cool sitting that way, and he knows it, but it's still kind of a cheesy move. No one ever had the heart to tell him that he was cheesy though.

Suzanne mentions that there is something he can help her with, and they begin with what she thinks is some seemingly harmless material. "Can you review the cranial nerves with me? I have trouble remembering all of them."

Are you fucking kidding me? After all that grief she gave him about the cranial nerve mnemonic that she seemed to remember quite well when she confronted him about it. He's not dumb enough to fall for the trap that she's seemingly unaware she has made, so he'll just stick with the mnemonic he told the class the first time.

"Ok Suzanne, there's a simple mnemonic to memorize the names of the cranial nerves. Its 'Only One Orange To Try..."

She cuts him off. "I'm actually not that good with mnemonics. They don't really help me that much." She doesn't use mnemonics? Is she nuts? They're the best, according to Mr. Hardwick.

She must be one of those chicks that uses mind maps, like Diane Springer teaches.

As if she's reading his mind she continues, "I usually use mind maps."

Mind maps? Mind maps?! Fucking Mind Maps!? He's trying to give her the gold standard of mnemonics and she wants to do fucking mind maps? The mnemonics worked for him, a not so former dumb jock, so that means they should work for everyone.

He's heard about mind maps, and he vaguely remembers trying to use them when they were taught to him during a continuing education seminar he was forced to attend once. He tried it, but it never really made sense to him.

He plays along. "Ok, we'll do a mind map."

She writes the Roman numeral I in the center of a blank piece of paper she has pulled out and next to it writes Olfactory Nerve. She circles her writing, and then draws a diagonal line, shooting off from the circle.

What an idiotic style of learning. There are ideas and scattered thoughts all over the place. There's simply no order to it. You can't learn shit that way. Mind maps are clearly inferior to the mighty mnemonic, and Suzanne is reinforcing this notion to him the more they move along.

He patiently feeds her information nonetheless. "The olfactory nerve relays sensory data to the brain about what one smells."

Next to the diagonal line she has drawn, she writes, "sensory data" and puts another circle around that phrase. She then draws a line connecting to that bubble and writes "smell," before placing a bubble around that word, too.