Poems- Collin Brown

The learning technique that I chose was to utilize poems to recall information. Commonly, many elementary and pre-school teachers use songs, a form of poetry, to convey meaning and to make sure students are learning the information and not just memorizing. In 1835, the Boston based music publisher Charles Bradlee created and copyrighted the Alphabet song we commonly know today. Although it was only a few simple lines, the tune with the rhythm of the letters helped children to easily learn the alphabet. The song still remains today and is taught by teachers all across the United States. It helps children to learn and remember their ABC’s for the rest of their lives. Similarly, I used a poem to convey the information in the neuroscience unit. My poems were easy to understand and included a bit of humor, making them more relatable to students. The poems, although brief, contained a good amount of information for a student to learn the basics of neuroscience. Learning this way is very effective, as it is a good way to keep things stuck in your brain. If you can read a poem and relate to it, it will most likely be easier to remember and relate to other subjects. This relation to other subjects is when the real learning occurs. If a student can remember what he or she heard in a poem, they will be able to take the information and apply it to a real world situation. The poems, because they are relatable and easy to understand, are the best learning strategies for students.

After running through the strategy of reading poems myself, I found I could easily recall the information presented in the poems. They were effective because of the ease of comprehension of the language. Also, the poems were easy to relate to. For example, one poem about the effect of peer influence on behavior describes situations students go through in high school everyday. Because I am a teenager in high school and experience these influences everyday, I can easily read and relate to the material in the poem. This makes the material easier to remember. Although the strategies were effective in helping me learn the neuroscience material, the length of the poems could be expanded to include more information. Also, if the poems were set to music and made into a song, the information would most likely stick with me even more. I would be able to think of the catchy rhythm and tune that went with the song, making it easier to remember. This would have the same effect on me as the alphabet song did when I was younger. In my strategy, learning was used effectively because I was able to remember the information on my own. Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experience. The change occurred after I read the poems and they were stored as information in my brain. The behavior that changed was my memory. My memory was triggered to know the information within the poem. Therefore, my memory was also used effectively. Last, the language within the poems was easy to read and understand. Because of this, more learning took place and I was more capable of recalling the information that was given to me. The language made recalling the information easier because I could understand and relate to the words being used in each line of the poem. Overall, the learning strategy I picked, writing poems to learn information, was the best strategy because it is easy to understand, relatable, and an excellent way to recall tricky information.