20% Time Speech

This was a good idea. 20% time was a good idea. I’m glad I had the chance to spend 20% of every not so Friday on whatever I chose to do, and I chose to strum my little heart out on a ukulele.  That’s right I chose to play the ukulele with no instrumental experience prior to the project. Some might say this might have been a bad idea, which at times it was, but I saw an opportunity to do something that I had never tried before and I went for it.

            What did I accomplish? Good question. I didn’t accomplish much honestly. I somewhat accomplished my goal, which was to learn how to play one song fluently on the ukulele, and if I had enough time to write my own song. I sort of accomplished half of my goal; I learned how to play one song maybe not so fluently. I have to say, I didn’t think I would even be able to play the stupid thing at all, but by saying that I don’t think that I am good at the ukulele at all, because to me I’m not. In terms of measuring up to my goal I think that I did okay, but no more than that. I did set a pretty high goal for 20% of every Friday for a few months. Of course I didn’t expect myself to come out of the project a master uke player.

            The biggest thing I learned from this project is how hard it is to play instruments. This project has opened my eyes to how much practice professionals put into making music with instruments, and I now have so much respect for them. To put it simply and to not sound like a broken record up here, I learned basically all I said that I accomplished. Aside from one thing, I learned how much time and effort it takes to learn and master an instrument like I stated earlier. I still need to learn how to play more fluently, how to play more songs, and how to just become an overall better ukulele player.

            I only really had one challenge, and that was that I didn’t really have a ukulele until about a third of the way through the project. My teacher, Mrs. Browning, as you all know allowed me to borrow her husband’s ukulele and that is how I overcame this obstacle.

            I think my biggest accomplishment was just learning how to play one song, like I hoped. Despite not achieving my entire goal, I think I most enjoyed this process because it was something new. I have never attempted any sort of instrumental goals or anything of the sort, so I just enjoyed having the chance to try something that I probably wouldn’t have the chance to do later in school. This project has been, in a word, stressful. But it wasn’t a bad stressful, its almost as if I would so much rather be stressing about working on this project than to be stressing about some ridiculously hard math test coming up. I absolutely enjoyed this project just like I thought I would and I’m extremely glad I had the chance to do it. My final thoughts on the project? I am almost sad its over because this is the best project I’ve ever done and I know I won’t get another one anything like it.