Presidential Calendar Mnemonic, Chapter 1: A Simpler Method

Presidential Calendar Mnemonic (PDF coming soon)
Chapter 1: A Simpler Method
Chapter 2: Mod7 Magic
Chapter 3: The Recipe
Chapter 4: Ten Months
Chapter 5: Zanuary and Zebruary
Chapter 6: US Presidential Elections
Chapter 7: Silly Stories
Chapter 8: Mastery

When I was young, my brother and I learned how to memorize the calendar. It was a fun trick to learn, and our parents used it occasionally to show off how clever their boys were.

• Mom: “Hey Garry, show Anne your calendar trick.”

• Me: “Okay, pick any day this year. I’ll tell you the day of the week, without looking at a calendar.”

• Anne: “ Really? Okay, so what day is December 5?”

• Me: (after thinking a bit) “Friday.”

• Anne (after checking her calendar): “That’s right! Cool! Can you tell me what day I was born?”

Disappointingly, I could not. Although the mnemonics book I was reading taught me how to know dates for a single year, it said the method for conjuring calendar dates for all years in all centuries was beyond its scope. Now some decades later, with my memory skills less sharp, I delved deeper into this topic. I tried to learn existing methods, but to be honest, I was still not able to mentally calculate dates for multiple years, let alone multiple centuries. The hardest part was memorizing long lists of numbers, or doing math in my head, or doing both at the same time. I judged that a person of average abilities would have little chance of learning it and keeping it for long.

So I set out to invent a calendar mnemonic that, I think, a person of average intelligence can perform successfully. My method, called the Presidential Calendar Mnemonic is what I will publish in this series of eight articles.

In a nutshell, here is how most calendar mnemonics work, including mine. Given a date (like July 4, 1776) we will add four small numbers that represent the century (1700s), the two-digit year (76), the month (July), and day of the month (4th). We will sprinkle a bit of “mod7 magic” along the way to arrive at a small number, which is a day code between 0 and 6. These numbers represent Sunday through Saturday.

The formula is simple, but the challenge is knowing what numbers to add together. A second challenge is dealing with a complication imposed by leap years.

Let’s begin with the end in mind… day codes. The final step of the recipe is converting day codes (0-6) to days of the week (Sunday-Saturday). The simplest way of remembering this is the work week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, are represented by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The weekend days are bookends. Sunday is 0 and Saturday is 6.

If you want extra help, especially at a beginner, consider these memory aids:

• 0: Sunday is the ‘0’riginal day of the week. Picture a big bright 0 in the sky and think “🌞Day,” or “None Day.”

• 1: Monday, the first day of the work week, sounds like “m’One Day”.

• 2: Tuesday, the second day of the work week, sounds exactly like “Two’s day.” This is a fan favorite.

• 3: Wednesday is the third day of the work week. Hold up three fingers. It looks like a W for Wednesday, or turn W on its side, and you have a 3.

• 4: Thursday, the fourth day of the work week, sounds a bit like “Four’s Day.” Or say Thursday in a Cockney accent… “FursDay.”

• 5: Friday, the fifth day of the work week, sounds kind of like “Five’s Day.”

• 6: Saturday is “Six Pack Day” or “Sixter Day.”

We want to be able to do these conversions quickly and automatically, because speed is impressive. So practicing is the key. Try rolling a die, or write a random string of day codes like this: “5, 0, 2, 6, 3, 4, and 1.” You should be able to say quickly that these are “Friday, Sunday, Tuesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday.” With practice, you won’t need memory aids because you will just know the answer automatically.

I mentioned sprinkling mod7 magic. I’ll explain what that means in Chapter 2. Then we’ll be ready in Chapter 3 to perform the calendar parlor trick with a limited set of codes. Our scope will accelerate quickly after that.

This is the initial release, so you will be among the first to use my method. I hope you will try to learn it, because I need feedback. I want to know if you can you do it. If so, what are its strengths and weaknesses?