For the 1979-80 school year, I was in the fourth grade, and my science teacher was Mrs. Dillard. She taught the metric system with conviction and gusto. (She also bummed me out for a week once because I came home believing soil erosion was the gravest problem facing humankind, but that’s another story.)
Anyway, partially because of her passion, I’ve been ready for the United States to go metric for most of 30 years now. Let’s go tomorrow. Let’s go right now. I want it because it makes sense, but now that I think about it I can also probably find an angle for an obscene consultation/implementation wage for a few months.
Mrs. Dillard taught us the mnemonic Katie Hates Doctors, Boys, Dentists, Cats, and Mice for the prefixes kilo, hecto, deca/deka, (base), deci, centi, and milli. I suspect today she’d be thrown up on the hood of a Sensitivity Police squad car, cuffed, and thrown in the Healing Tank for a few hours for daring to teach something that contained the word “hate.” Come to think of it, she also taught King Phillip Came Over From Germany Smoking for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, and God only knows what they’d do to her for that.
Sheesh, I never considered how politically incorrect my elementary school science education was before now.
So what would you guess the mnemonic Sally Led The Puppy To The Court House was for? Well, those are the carpal bones: scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform,
trapezium, trapezoid, capate, and hamate. Until this gets crawled, Google returns no results for the query “Sally led the puppy,” so I’m guessing my human physiology teacher Mrs. Turner wrote that one on her own. This bit of knowledge is on up there in the 98th percentile or so of stuff in my head that I use least, along with how to clean and lubricate a Taylor soft serve machine and the atomic number of fermium (it’s 100).
On the other hand, my geometry teacher Mr. Bennett made us memorize the squares of 1 through 25, and that has been useful stuff to know off the top of my head. I’d bet I’ve gone to that every week or two, for one reason or another, for 20 years. (Embarrassingly, I only noticed five or so years ago that the perfect squares increment by odd integers.)
Most of this stuff rattles, but some of it tintinnabulates.
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I remember a lot of mneemonics from school – its so funny that things like that stick for sucha long time! Isn’t it? But I’m sure by today’s standards – if you can call them that – you could only use happy words. Hate and smoking would be out of there for sure.
I am actually going to try to learn a few mnemonics for the “Califonia Job Case” – drawers for lead type for letterpresses. They are arranged in the order of most used… and the sections for the most used are a lot larger too.