This was a class that I took during the fall semester in 2018. I was excited for it because I like rock music a bit and know a little bit of it, so I thought it would be cool to learn the history of this music style. The class ended up being us writing notes while the professor lectured with power-points, which got boring and too repetitive after a while. It was fun to listen to snippets of certain songs though that related to the time in rock history that we were talking about. I even knew some of them, but not all of them. A lot of the information from the power-points was also in the textbook that we read, so some of the information repeated itself. To me, that is good because it made the information stick a little better in my memory. Something else we did in the class was listening quizzes where we heard a part of the song and had to know the artist, song title, and some small fact about something that had to do with either of those things. The fact part was the hardest part of the quizzes because we had to know everything on the power-points as a possibility because there were no hints to what the fact would be until we got the quiz. Another thing about the quizzes was that we had lists of songs that could be heard on them, but it wasn’t likely they would all be on the quiz. This led me to make playlists of the songs so that I could listen to them on shuffle and try to quiz myself on them and get others to quiz me on them. I feel like this made my memory stronger than it was before. It turned out to be an ok class where I learned some music history which I had never thought of learning before.
The artifact I have here is the research paper we had to do that compared an artist from before 1965 to an artist after 1965. At that time I hadn’t done really any research papers before, so this was new to me. The teacher was helpful whenever I needed it or anyone in the class needed it, so that was good. For my research paper, I compared Chuck Berry and Ozzy Osbourne. For Chuck Berry, I looked at his song Roll Over Beethoven and how Berry’s life was changed after being jailed. I then looked at how Ozzy Osbourne’s career was helped after he was jailed. I listened to Roll Over Beethoven lots of times to get the feel of the song right and write it in words. That is something we learned in the class, is how to describe a song in many different ways like rhythm and instruments. I had never done that before, so this shows how I got better at that over the semester. Also, I did my best on the information I got and citations because this was before my English class that helped me be better at these things. This paper was the best I could do at the time and I’m always pushing myself to be better at papers and writing.