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Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
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Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:06:37 -0700
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Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
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Alan Eliasen <[log in to unmask]>
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   I don't know if Twain would have been comfortable teaching *about*
his own works.  (And who would?)  After all, the preface to Huck Finn
says, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

   However, I think that he was quite adept at finding good ways to
teach and remember facts.  For example, his story "How to Make History
Dates Stick," available at
http://www.twainquotes.com/HistoryDates/HistoryDates.html
discusses some techniques that he used to help himself remember the
sections of his speeches, using a few sentences, which he had a hard
time remembering, and later changed to be a few drawings, which helped
him remember effortlessly.  He said, of the drawings, "That was a
quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than
twenty years ago, but I would rewrite it from the pictures--for they
remain."

   This is similar to the techniques used by many modern "memory
experts" to build a series of images in their mind that would help them
remember more easily.

   The rest of the article talks about how he helped his daughters learn
the dates of the reigns of British monarchs.  He laid out a series of
signs along his road at "the farm" (Quarry?).  The length of each
stretch showed the length of the reign of each monarch, with one foot
indicating a year, with drawings and colors on each sign to represent
the monarch.

   I'm reminded of psychologist A. R. Luria's fascinating book, "The
Mind of a Mnemonist," in which he describes a memory expert with the
rare condition of "synaesthesia", for whom a word or sound would not
only trigger an auditory response, but due to some interesting wiring in
the brain, would tend to trigger repeatable smells, and sights, and
feels, and shapes.  The patient used this ability, and worked at other
memory techniques, to build a "story" around things he was trying to
remember and developed a prodigious ability to remember series of words
or numbers even many years after being presented them for the first time.

   Twain would probably be an interesting and inventive teacher.

  Alan Eliasen

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