Stop, look and listen...

2012:  A179 - Start Listening to Music

Having spotted a music course in the technology stuff that I would have loved to study but hadn't the moolah to afford, I'd decided that my final 10 point 'break' would be this course.

Ha!! How wrong can one student get??  Far from being a nice easy couple of months between the end of Level 2 and the start of Level 3, this 'little' course was the hardest thing since the great Washing Basket Quest of 2004.  I did better on the assignments and final result than I dared to hope, so something must have made it in past the brain-fog, but I have a new-found admiration for any students of music out there.  This has been the only course in my entire OU career where I submitted the assignments not knowing whether I had done enough to pass, and where I had actually contemplated quitting the course before the final assignment if I had not done well on the first one.

What I didn't realise that was, to start properly 'listening' to music instead of simply hearing it, one needs a fair amount of quiet time.  Now I dunno how many people out there have 6 -year olds, but I can probably bet that quiet time is not a thing held in abundance by most parents.  I sat there one night trying to find the rhythm and metre in some bit of Mozart or another (Leopold not Wolfgang...didn't even know there was a Leopold till now), and our boy was literally 'mewing' in his bedroom next door.

Now, generally speaking, when the noise from next door gets too loud, I take the study books in the bath and drown out the noise with the sound of the water running, but with a course presented online and snippets of music requiring stop/restart constantly, studying in the bath was not an option.  So I had to resort to taking it to bed on the 'tablet' we had recently bought.

But hey-ho (or a nonny-nonny-no, or some such ditty), pass I did, and that brings us neatly up to date....and to the beginning of the Big Bad Scaries!!