When a person is giving you instructions about the things which he would like to have you do, follow the same plan. Simply transfer the words of the speaker into an exaggerated moving picture and the impression will stay with you. Another student told me this experience: "My employer often used to say to me, after having given some instruction, 'Do you see?' I realize now that the reason that I made so many mistakes was because I did not SEE. Now I make it a point to SEE the things he asks me to do and my reply, 'Yes, I see,' has a very different meaning. The results are also different."
Mastering Difficult Lists
In the child's studies there are often lists of different kinds which need to be committed to memory and which present considerable difficulty to say nothing of the time required. Following are aids and illustrations which will show how these lists can be mastered with comparatively small effort and little time.
Fix in Mind by Initialing
Take the initial letter of each of the words which you wish to remember and use these as the first letter of simple words which will combine into an expression which has a meaning. This is very helpful, and is sometimes called "initialing." We have all learned the sentence:
E G B D F
Every Good Boy Deserves Food,
in order to remember the names of the lines of the treble clef; the letters of the word F A C E are the spaces. In a similar way the lines of the bass clef can be remembered by the following:
G B D F A
Good Bees Deserve Faithful Attention,
and the spaces by: