The Loop for Logs

A few years ago, when I was introducing logs, I drew some arrows like this:

I wanted to show that this base here goes with this exponent over there which goes with this answer over here . . .

Then I noticed one of my students drawing a loop on all of his papers, like this:

He said it helped him remember the order, especially for when one of the terms was a variable.  This has turned out to be a pretty helpful mnemonic device for changing logs to exponential form.

This year, when my calc students (who were also in my algebra 2 class) encountered a log, I just reminded them of the loop and they were like "Oh yeah, the loop."