The Ornamental Horticulture course prepares students for careers in the nursery, landscaping, and floral industries.

There are many who believe that "less is more" when it comes to using technology. This is the heart of the debate around recording vocals in music: how much manipulation is too much? If recording engineers and producers can use computers and software to digitally alter a vocal track, what happens to the original voice, and what role does talent play? To many, there is a fine line between the "perfection"that can be achieved with technology and the experience of "authenticity" in a recorded vocal performance. This lesson explores the ways in which music technology can enhance a singer's performance. It also considers the listener's interest in hearing the "authenticity" of a vocal performance. Either way, the heart of most popular music is the same, important center: the human voice.

This lesson explores several strands of the musical "DNA" that make up the beat of popular music. Looking to the past, this lesson asks what it means to call music "Afro-Cuban" "Afro-Caribbean," or more broadly, "African-American." Students will use Soundbreakingclips of Santana and Beyonce and the Soundbreaking Rhythmic Layers TechTools to locate in American popular music influences stemming from the African-American church, Latin America and West Africa. Students will then explore the ways "the beat" of this music has, to some listeners, been perceived as "dangerous" while, for others, it is believed that music has been able to challenge obstacles of racism and segregation, bringing people from varied ethnic groups and lifestyles together in ways that words and laws could not.

In this lesson students explore the creative concepts and technological practices on which Hip Hop music was constructed, investigating what it means to "sample" from another style, who has used sampling and how. Then, students experience the technology first hand using the Soundbreaking Sampler TechTool. Students will follow patterns of Caribbean immigration and the musical practices that came to New York City as a result of those patterns, finally considering the ways in which Hip Hop reflects them. Moving forward to the late 1980s and early 90s, what some consider Hip Hop's "Golden Age," this lesson explores how sampling might demonstrate a powerful creative expression of influence or even a social or political statement. Finally, this lesson encourages students to consider the conceptual hurdle Hip Hop asked listeners to make by presenting new music made from old sounds.

In this lesson, students use examples from visual art as well as rap to enter into a "structured academic controversy" that explores the concept of originality.

The 24-hour-a-day music video programming of MTV gave musicians and their audiences a platform to fully explore the experience of sound and image. In this lesson, students will investigate the ways musicians used video before MTV, then consider how MTV changed the way artists have exploited the surprising territory where sound meets image.

In this lesson, students follow the life journey of Blues musician McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, from his early beginnings in rural Mississippi to his music career in Chicago, Illinois. In learning about Waters' life, students consider the ways new environments might inspire people to express themselves in different ways. Students then reflect on ways new experiences might have spurred their own personal growth by creating a life roadmap.

This lesson explores the possibilities created by the new technology of cassettes and how people made use of them. In many ways, the digital future and its interactive possibilities were prefigured by the cassette era. By viewing and discussing clips from Soundbreaking Episode Eight, students learn how the Grateful Dead allowed their fans to tape their concerts and freely trade cassettes of their recordings, a move that helped establish the group as innovators in how bands cultivate relationships with their fanbase. Students will also consider how the cassette allowed individuals to express themselves through the selection, sequencing and re-packaging of commercially released music. In the last part of the lesson, they will look at the Sony Walkman and related devices, the first portable cassette players that led toward the current age of iPods, Mp3 players, and other forms of personal digital listening devices, exploring a period in which the boundaries between "consumer" and "producer," and "fan" and "participant" began to erode, allowing even the casual music fan a degree of access to the creative process.

In this lesson, Gospel music is used as a way to introduce students to the rhythmic concepts of beat, meter, backbeat, subdivision, and syncopation. By clapping and counting along to videos of Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Staple Singers, and Beyonce, students practice hearing and identifying these various aspects of rhythm. Students will also use an interactive TechTool to gain a deeper understanding of the syncopated rhythms that allows Gospel, as well a popular music in general, inspire us to move.

In this lesson, students investigate these questions by analyzing videos of dancing through the decades. With the help of a worksheet, student groups watch footage of the Charleston and Lindy Hop, the Mambo, "Love-in" dancing, Disco, and Break Dancing. Based on their informed observation of these styles, they then debate whether dance has "evolved" in American culture, or remained mostly the same.

Taking Sam Phillips as a case study, this lesson explores the role of the producer in the recording studio as one defined by an ability to guide the recording process but also to affect the wider cultural context. After investigating what a producer does and why an artist might benefit from a producer's services, this lesson looks at the way Sam Phillips' approach in some ways reflects the trend of urbanization in the American South. Like Phillips, many of his artists came from rural backgrounds and were seeking the benefits of urban life. That move toward the urban, and the racial mixing it fostered, was almost encoded in the music, as the lesson activities will illuminate. Finally, the lesson looks at Phillip's guidance of a young Elvis Presley and suggests how the music they produced created an opening for African-American music to "crossover" into mainstream American popular music.

Phil Spector and George Martin both created defining sounds of the 1960s, but, inevitably, as music and culture changed, so too did some musicians' ideas about allowing producers to exert control over their music. Some of the Singer-Songwriters of the early 1970s, such as Joni Mitchell, accepted little or no input from producers, focusing on the clarity and directness of the lyrics with sometimes minimal musical accompaniment. In the latter part of this lesson, students use a handout with information about both Betty Friedan's seminal The Feminine Mystique and events in 1960s Second-Wave Feminism as a backdrop by which to consider Joni Mitchell's decision to "self-produce"in the early 1970s.

SP.255 is a lecture, discussion, and project based seminar about the physics of rock climbing. Participants are first exposed to the unsolved problems in the climbing community that could be answered by research and then asked to solve a small part of one of these problems. The seminar provides an introduction to engineering problems, an opportunity to practice communication skills, and a brief stab at doing some research. This seminar explicitly does not include climbing instruction nor is climbing/mountaineering experience a prerequisite.

Plant and Soil Science covers topics such as plant classification, physiology, reproduction, plant breeding, biotechnology, and pathology. Students will learn about soil management, water, pests, and equipment as well as cultural and harvest practices.

Production of Educational Videos is an introduction to technical communication that is situated in the production of educational videos; the assignments are all focused on the production of videos that teach some aspect of MIT's first-year core curriculum. The objective of these assignments is improvement in both communication ability and communication habits; these improvements are effected by providing participants with instruction, practice, feedback, and the opportunity for reflection. In addition to improvements in communication skills, improvement is expected in students' attitude towards writing, oral presentations, and collaboration; as the semester progresses, students should feel confident of their ability to write, present, and collaborate.

Uncountable times every day with the merest flick of a finger each one of us calls on electricity to do our bidding. What would your life be like without electricity? Students begin learning about electricity with an introduction to the most basic unit in ordinary matter, the atom. Once the components of an atom are addressed and understood, students move into the world of electricity. First, they explore static electricity, followed by basic current electricity concepts such as voltage, resistance and open/closed circuits. Next, they learn about that wonderful can full of chemicals the battery. Students may get a "charge" as they discover the difference between a conductor and an insulator. The unit concludes with lessons investigating simple circuits arranged "in series" and "in parallel," including the benefits and unique features associated with each. Through numerous hands-on activities, students move cereal and foam using charged combs, use balloons to explore electricity and charge polarization, build and use electroscopes to evaluate objects' charge intensities, construct simple switches using various materials in circuits that light bulbs, build and use simple conductivity testers to evaluate materials and solutions, build and experiment with simple series and parallel circuits, design and build their own series circuit flashlight, and draw circuits using symbols.

This course combines classroom and community classroom instruction to prepare students for employment in the retail industry. Training will include elements of the sale, types of retailing, types of merchandise, customer relations, merchandising, pricing, inventory control, visual merchandising, operations, promotional elements, and human resources. Emphasis is placed on real world application of learning through work experience in the community. Employability skills emphasized include: preparing for employment, business attitudes, work habits and attendance.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade ELA.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade English Language Arts. 

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade Math.