Proposal

Kayleen 
My goal for my 20% Time is to teach myself how to play the guitar over the next 16 weeks without professional assistance. As of now I don’t plan to work with anyone specific all the time, but I may ask a friend for help sometime during my learning. I will mostly rely on guitar courses from the Internet, but my friend will also be helping me occasionally since she knows how to play guitar. The audience that I am targeting is, inevitably my humanities class, and possibly those interested in teaching themselves guitar. This project is worthwhile because it is good to know how to play an instrument and is a good use of my time, since I tend to waste time doing useless things when I could be doing something productive. The project will also help me develop skills that I can use in school, such as time management, responsibility, etc.

I obviously expect to know how to play the guitar, though not like a professional who has played for years, but know enough to play at a decent level. Besides knowing how to play, I also hope to be able to learn how to manage my time better and be able to teach myself how to do something over an extended period of time, while having to balance these lessons and schoolwork. I do not have any extracurricular activities outside of school, and I believe that this opportunity will allow me to make use of my time productively. I hope to find this project enjoyable to do, rather than it being burdensome in achieving a good grade.
The product that I plan to show for my presentation is a final video of me playing one or more songs on the guitar. I may plan to take a short video halfway through to show the progress I made to lead up to the final video. This project does not exactly require me to pay for anything besides maybe a book for guitar tutorials and pieces, because I already own a guitar for children at home. I may plan to borrow an actual guitar from my friend who is offering to help me if I need assistance.

Since I am only provided with a limited amount of time to complete this task, I have to plan wisely on how I am going to succeed in learning how to play. I am planning to use youtube and free lessons online from websites like http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ and http://www.justinguitar.com/ as two examples. I will try to plan what I should achieve every four weeks. To start, I will research more about the acoustic guitar (anatomy, etc.), and its difference from electric, and also learn and memorize the chords (and the difference between minor and major). I can then learn and practice techniques like slides and trills, scales, and study what the base note of each string is. Another thing to learn would be frets, and how each fret down is a completely different note. I will learn about the different notes and tempos and as the weeks go by, the difficulty of what I am learning will gradually increase until I can play well enough to play a full song. After these 16 weeks, I will film a final video of me playing a song of my choice and present it to the class. Learning how to play the guitar in 16 weeks will be a difficult task, especially because of schoolwork and limited time, but I will have to stay focused since basically all of this project will be done outside of class. During class, I can get started on my reflection or do more research on what to learn to add to my schedule plan. By the end of this project, I hope to gain new skills and confidence in learning new things by myself and successfully play a song at a moderate level.