Music Appreciation and French at Cameron University

I am attending Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma and as an adult student returning to college after twenty years, I was somewhat overwhelmed by all the classes available and what I needed to meet my general education requirements. I already had most of my required courses and mostly needed electives to fill my 50 hours of general education.

I am really fond of liberal arts and humanities courses, so I flipped to that section in my catalog to see what was available. For the spring semester I chose Music Appreciation with Mr. Detweiler.

This was an amazing course. Mr. Detweiler is smart and humorous, but most importantly he loves music and it was entirely evident in the way that he taught the course. He was absolutely exuberant about the music we listened to and explained the intricacies of it to the class in great detail.

The class was not really a difficult one, but it was very educational. The text was easy to follow and had a companion website that allowed you to self-test on your knowledge of what you had learned so far. The chapter tests were taken directly from the website.

Mr. Detweiler also required students to write two papers during the course as part of the "writing across the curriculum" program. You could either write one paper on a musical composition and the other could be a concert report or you could write two concert reports. Each report had to contain a certain number of the musical terms that you had learned during the class.

This is a class that I would definitely recommend to anyone who needs a Humanities course to meet their general education requirement. In fact, I enjoyed Mr. Detweiler's class so much that I am taking his American Popular Music class in the fall.

For the summer semester I chose to take Beginning French I. I had two years of French in high school, so I was hoping that would help me out.

The class was small, with only eight students. This made it very easy to learn. Our instructor, Madame Greb, was excellent and answered all questions thoroughly. We learned vocabulary and grammar, as well as pronunciation. For the course final, the students are required to speak on a topic in French for five to ten minutes, as well as take a written exam.

This class was challenging, but if you paid attention and attended class it was fairly easy to make good grades.

Every university is going to require that you have Humanities courses to graduate and at Cameron University these are two courses that I would highly recommend.