CONCEPTUAL MEMORIZATION

By this, I refer to a strategy where you memorize things in the context of an important or unifying concept that helps you a) memorize the fact without getting confused and (often more important) b) WHY THE FACT IS IMPORTANT. By memorizing everything you know and linking it to other things, what would seem like random facts actually mess together really well. This might sound kind of fuzzy, but I’ll hopefully elucidate this with an example

Let’s say I’m studying the Meiji period of Japan, and I really want to memorize some discrete facts that summarize the political and economic activity of the time. An important concept to contextualize all facts would be that the Meiji restoration was essentially a “modernization” of Japan in terms of Industrialization and Military development. While there certainly was pre-industrialization during the Tokugawa (like the development of a more-or-less Capitalist economy), the Meiji is when you see Japan blossoming as an economic and military power that is comparable to the West in terms of gross wealth and might. This understanding will allow many other facts to follow: that this time period saw the rise of Zaibatsus, which were essentially business conglomerates (like Mitsubishi) that were the epitome of the “military-industrial complex.” This fact makes a lot of sense in the (unfortunately simplified and basic) background I gave you. Another example is the idea of the “family state,” in which citizens were seen as family members of the state, the “patriarch.” It was in essence a feeling of collectivism that everyone put the needs of the whole over the individual. This sort of conceptual framework makes easier to understand the numerous “liberal” movements of the Taisho Democracy (like Feminism and Socialism) and the subsequent crushing of them with the Peace Preservation Law. In addition, this notion of the family state makes it easy to grasp the idea of “tenko” incidents, where people were kidnapped, tortured, and forced to recant their political beliefs.

But let’s go beyond the humanities: this style will help you with science as well. Let’s take Biology. I’m going to avoid any religious or epistemological debates, but Evolution is the unifying concept of biology that pretty much links every single subfield of biology together. When I took Bio 1B, Shabel did a damn good job with this, but it’s important to think of everything in the context of evolution. When learning the differences between Bryophtes, Pteridophytes, Gymnosperms, and Angiosperms, look at them with respect to the evolutionary history of land plants, specifically with their adaptations to land life. Things like the introduction of a Vascular system, the seed, and the ovary are things that make a lot more sense when you think of evolutionary history.

While the two examples above are great, I think the most important application of this (thus far) has been Organic Chemistry. You may have heard this, but there’s *quite* a bit of material, and it can be rather overwhelming if you don’t know *how* to study. The best way to O-Chem is to UNDERSTAND EVERY REACTION MECHANISM THAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW, because chances are there are times where you’ll have to draw out a mechanism that is similar but not the same to something you’ve seen before, and if all you do is memorize products, you are boned with a fat femur. The best way to do this is to understand WHY things happen. For example, when you’re reacting an Alkene with H-Br, don’t just memorize that in the first step, the pi electrons pick off the H while the Br gets the electrons from the H-Br bond: understand WHY this is exactly what happens. In this case, the reasoning is quite simple: the pi electrons are an electron dense area, and the H is an electron dearthy (idk if that’s a word) area owing to Br’s electronegativity. As the glorious GSI Payton once said, “The vast majority of O-Chem is electron dense areas attacking electron sparse areas.” This was a fairly easy example, so I’ll move on to a slightly less obvious example: namely, why hydroboration adds an –OH and an H in a syn manner (the same side). Instead of just memorizing that it just happens, look at it through the lens of le old mechanism. The pi electrons from the alkene attack one of the H’s on the BH3, and the electrons from one of the B-H bonds attacks a carbon on the alkene. This sort of mechanism forms a Ring-like transition state. Because the transition state is a ring, it makes sense that that things added on will be on the same side in the same plane.

To summarize: don’t blindly memorize shit. Memorize things in the context of other things to make sense of the confusing nonsense we call college classes. Thanks for reading, and please give me corrections, feedback, and endearing messages of love. 🙂