During my Junior year of high school, my parents were in the midst of overwhelming me with studying for the SAT’s. I remember performing so poorly on my practice exams, that my parents insisted on getting me heavy tutoring in almost all subjects to increase my horrible scores. One of my weakest areas was vocabulary. I honestly thought that the words were absolute nonsense and had no interest in learning any of them. Nevertheless, I was forced into memorizing countless vocabulary words and was quizzed on them weekly.
When I heard about the Tip of the Tongue Phenomena during class, I instantly thought about myself and my endless struggle to memorize SAT vocabulary. The phenomena is defined as a problem with retrieval, where a person can say things about the word, but simply cannot recall the word. I would study vocabulary words for an hour every night, in order to prepare for my “quizzes” and at the end of every week, there would be at least one word I could not remember. My tutor would tell me, “If you say that it’s on the tip of your tongue one more time I’m quitting my job” Although it was funny, I was extremely annoyed by this because the word always was on the tip of my tongue. I tried and I tried but I honestly would be unable to remember certain words. It came to the point where I would come up with catchy phrases for the word and synonyms, but that seemed to make things worse. I knew so much about the word, just not the word itself.
After constantly restudying and relearning words I was expected to know, I came to the test and not one word I agonized over for months appeared on my SAT. To make things worse, I did not even recognize a synonym of any of the words on my test. This is exactly why memorization is a terrible way to study: especially when you are the type of person who cannot even remember what they had for dinner the previous night. After several failed attempts to learn any new vocabulary, I realized I had to change the way I studied and actually try to show some sort of interest in what I am studying.
Not only did I learn that I despise the SAT, but I learned that my memory has always been awful, and I need to start working on it. I don’t know any of my four siblings birthdays nor my parents, no matter how many times I am told, and I can barely remember important parts of my childhood. I don’t think that anything is wrong with me, I just think I have a rotten memory, and need to work a lot harder than most people when it comes to studying and learning new things. The bottom line is, the tip of the tongue phenomena describes me perfectly.