Pluto Questions

Full disclosure... I've had Pluto on my mind this week because of THE FUTURE OF US by Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler.  In this clever and intriguing book, which I have not yet finished reading, two teens from 1996 stumble upon their future Facebook pages.  In one chapter they read an obscure post from 2011 about missing Pluto, and they imagine it has been obliterated by a meteor.  This brought up my old feelings of severe disappointment about Pluto's downgraded status, but it also got my mind churning.

When I was a child, in 4th or 5th grade, a teacher described a clever way to remember the order of the planets in our solar system.  From sweltering Mercury to chilly Pluto, each planet was assigned a word that, put all together, described something about Earth mothers and pizza.

Honestly, I never committed to memory this teacher's pizza-related planet method.  The reason for this is because my sister had already taught me the following, which she had learned as a kid from a different teacher...

Many
Vigorous
Earth
Men
Jump
Straight
Up
Near
Pluto

One must wonder how many elementary-age kids use the word Vigorous, but nevertheless, I enjoy the directness.  Now a question or two comes to mind, and I ask anyone who has been kind and/or brave enough to have made it this far...

1)  What planet-memorization method did you learn as a child?  I imagine there were multiple methods, limited only by vocabulary and imagination

2)  What planet-memorization method do children learn nowadays?  Without Pluto, the chosen words must be radically different from what I learned or even from the Earth mothers & pizza one.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave your answers in the Post a Comment section below.  And please check out my two other Pluto-related posts by clicking SHORT  and  VENGEANCE

Be well, Readers, and Freak Out...
JLH

P.S. Don't forget to read VENGEANCE and SHORT