What's wrong with the ABCs?

It’s so cute hearing little kids sing the ABC’s to the tune of Twinkle. Pairing groups of letters with a melody helps encode the information and makes active recall much more effective.

Except that Twinkle is hard for little voices to sing.

For Twinkle, you have to learn how to sing 6 different notes.

If you use the melody from “Mary had a little lamb” to sing the ABC’s, you only have to learn 3 notes.

For Twinkle, you have to sing 21 different words.

For “Mary had a little lamb,” you only have to learn 11 different words.

For Twinkle, you have to sing a large leap of 5 notes at the beginning, and then 3 more times after that. Large leaps are harder to sing than pitches than only go up or down by one.

For “Mary” you don’t have to sing any leaps at all. Every pitch only goes up or down by one note.

If we can make learning the ABC’s easier for millions of kids, why don’t we?

Likely, we blindly follow tradition simply because that’s the way we learned when we were growing up.

What other traditions are we blindly following?

Thanks for caring!

with gratitude,

Anwell Tsai