A trip down memory lane

After extended, theory of knowledge, and works in translation essays, who has fingers left to type a CAS reflection?  And thus, an idea I stole from Jessica:  reflection à la video.  Although I did start to lose my voice towards the end, so perhaps that's karmic retribution for my attempt to save my fingers from further hardship.

I may have been shirking my blogging duties, but I think this video does a pretty good job summing up this past summer/autumn/winter and my CAS experience over that time.  In case I said it a bit quickly, the url for my Junior Achievement website is crhsja.wix.com/dechameleon.  If you decide to check it out, you'll get to see the adorable logo I mentioned.  Tempting, no?

Easy as E, F, G

I'm back from Shad and busy with work and extended essay, but I've also been filling my time with one CAS project in particular:  guitar.  After I got back I was trying to practice every day, although for a week or so there in the middle I was off my game a bit due to extended essay work, but I'm hoping to get back into the rhythm (so to speak) of daily practices.  The online course I was taking before didn't really pan out, as it was during a busy time in school and it just wasn't practical, but my good friend Victoria lent me a beginner Guitar Method book at the end of the school year, and so I've been attempting to work through the exercises in that.  I've made it through the section on E, F, G, three notes on the first string, and over my last few sessions I've started working on notes B, C, D on second string.  I'm nowhere near good, of course, but I'm feeling pretty proud about my progress thus far, even if it's just going from awful to bad.

That was the final exercise in the E, F, G section that I've been working on.  My current focus is the song "Beautiful Brown Eyes" which uses all six of those notes, but that's still a work in progress.  Right now I'm only on page 12 of a 47 page book, so at least for this activity the direction I'm going to take is pretty easy to see.  I'm hoping that with daily practicing I'll be able to play an actual song by the end of the summer, but we'll see how it goes.

Introduction to guitar

I am currently attempting to learn how to play guitar.  Over the last few weeks I've purchased my instrument, a FG700MS Yamaha Acoustic, read up on a few articles, and watched some how-to videos on Youtube to learn the basics and how to play "Smoke on the Water", but today I took a big leap into something more organized:  I've enrolled in a (free) online class put on by a professor at Berklee College of Music.  The six week course actually started last week, so I've spent my afternoon playing catchup.  Last week's assignments don't count for me as I missed the deadline, but I'm doing them anyway for the learning experience.  I watched through the professor's video lessons on the difference between acoustic and electric guitars, the parts of guitars and guitar accessories, and fretboard maps and chord block diagrams.  Some of this information I'd encountered through my flings with Youtube how-to videos, but a lot of it was new and all and all this course is just a great environment for learning.  The last of week one's material was to practice A minor and E major chords and then to answer some questions pertaining to the difference in their sounds, so here's a short video of me working on learning them.

I still have to finish answering the questions (later there will be a peer review session with other students enrolled in the course), and then it will be on to week two!  I really should be studying for my math test tomorrow, but this is much more fun.