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Thirty days hath September April, June, and November All the rest have 31 Except for the very special one. ... The knuckles method, for those who don't kno

• javert 12y ago
  Re: the knuckle technique. I prefer to simply start over again from the first knuckle, as opposed to reversing direction. It gives you one less thing to remember, since you don't have to remember to repeat on the last knuckle.
  • smokey_the_bear 12y ago
    I learned it that you move onto the other hand.
    • bhrgunatha 12y ago
      Me too and it must mean something that I still use this method from time to time. Why is is so difficult to just remember?
      • javert 12y ago
        > Why is is so difficult to just remember? Probably because there is almost a pattern, but not quite.
  • pzxc 12y ago
    I prefer to reverse, because it emphasizes that there is a double-31 pair of consecutive months which is unique in the pattern and a good thing to know/remember (that both July and August are long months)
    • vidyesh 12y ago
      Instead of reverse just start over from the first knuckle again. You get 31 in either case.
      • jjaredsimpson 12y ago
        first says reverse, second says i prefer to start over, third says i prefer to reverse, you say start over.
• stevep98 12y ago
  This poem is such bullshit. You can substitute loads of other months and make it very wrong: Thirty Days hath December, March, July and November, All the rest have 31 Except January.
  • ternaryoperator 12y ago
    Of course, if you change the poem that gives you the correct number of days per month, then you won't get the right answer. That doesn't make the correct poem "bullshit."
    • Dylan16807 12y ago
      It means that the poem is not very resilient. It's pretty easy to misremember.
  • grayclhn 12y ago
    Yes, like most poems, this is one that you're better off remembering than trying to reconstruct on the fly.
    • smorrow 12y ago
      For me it's that the odd-numbered nomths have 31 days, and the even-numbered ones have less, in the first half of the year, and vice versa for the second half. That's better than the poem in that you can't mix it up, AND it's faster than audiating all of that.
      • grayclhn 12y ago
        As with most algorithms, there are trade-offs :). An advantage of the poem is that it can be learned by small children. I disagree that your approach can't be mixed up... I'm still trying to figure out what nomth is so I can implement it ;) I certainly wouldn't recommend my usual approach though: alternate 31/"not 31" starting from October (Halloween is the 31st) or March (my birthday is close enough to the end of the month for me to remember that March has 31 days.)
• tempestn 12y ago
  I always just found it easiest to remember the summer months (July and August) are the back to back 31 day ones, and the rest alternate. Add to that, there are plenty of "anchor" months to start from, which you know without having to figure it out. (Presumably you remember that February is short, that Halloween is Oct. 31, and that New Years Eve is Dec. 31, for instance.)
• thaumasiotes 12y ago
  As I learned it, the poem went Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November And all the rest have thirty-one excepting February alone And that has twenty-eight days clear and twenty-nine in each leap year That way's more explicit, but I like yours better. It reminds me of a homework problem I had in real analysis, which said "show that [the standard infinite series for e] is both strictly increasing and bounded above and therefore converges to a very special real number". On the due date, someone came into class saying "I could show that the series was increasing and bounded above, and therefore converged to a real number, but I didn't know how to show that the limit of the series was, quote, very special." :D
• wglb 12y ago
  That sounds harder than the ryhme, which we were forced to learn early on. The knuckle method seems to me to be the "simple" way to count cows--just count the legs and divide by four.