High school can often be a boring and dreadful experience. However, when your history teacher is tired of teaching the course curriculum, something interesting can happen to his students: incompetence.
My high school teacher listened to rock and roll. His preferred method of listening to the genre matured from his headphones to the 65-inch classroom SMART board used to teach the leaders of tomorrow. One of his favorite musicians was the legendary Ozzy Osbourne.
Ozzy Osbourne has recently passed away on July 22nd. It was such a tragic moment for such an icon. In light of his passing, I decided to write about his influence in my high school course and how it impacted my history knowledge.
My sophomore year of high school, I took a history course of the early 60s to the late 70s. I only remembered the stories about the…I am pulling a blank. This course was like Groundhog Day. However, I did not reflect on my life and make personal changes like the Phil Connors character from the movie. At the beginning of class, the teacher would give us packets based on which chapter of the history book we were on. Each week, we filled out new packets in class while the teacher sat behind his desk, questioning his whole life decision. Maybe his wishes were like Connors? I mean, the very next year, he decided to teach at an elementary school.
One day, he decided to do things a little differently in class. My guess is that a parent complained. She was most likely quizzing her child about history facts and he stared at her like she was speaking in a foreign language. Anyway, my history teacher got up in front of the class and exclaimed that it was too quiet in the classroom. He then proceeded to put on a Black Sabbath music video on the SMART board. I never saw someone with so much joy on his face. I wondered if Bill Clinton had the same joy when he was with Monica Lewinsky. Yes, I had to look that up…I almost wrote JFK. The music video was downright creepy, but I remember loving the music. I am usually an organized person, but at this time, I was so in shock that I did not write down the song title. However, I knew it was Black Sabbath. Later that night, I researched the band and came across the legendary Ozzy Osbourne. I became obsessed with his 1986 album “The Ultimate Sin”. I loved the songs “Shot in the Dark” and “Never” from the album.
After the music video, he did something unusual. The certified history teacher decided to start a Kahoot!, which is an online game-based learning platform that allows users to either create or use someone else’s quizzes. I loved Kahoot! and knowing that the final was approaching next week, I was excited to play a game based on the history material… or so I thought. Then I remembered that learning history in this class was like trying to get Neil Young and David Crosby to go on a road trip together – it would not happen. I would have loved to use a history joke here, but I don’t know any without using ChatGPT.
The Kahoot! was about rock history. Though I was shocked, I was excited that my teacher was passionate about something. The quiz has questions about rock and roll legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. This course inspired my passion for rock and roll.
The next week, I bombed my history test. There seemed to be no rock and roll questions, but instead ones about the Watergate scandal. To this day, I still believe Watergate was about the president having cops arrest doped-up students to warn the public about the harmful effects of drugs.
Here is everything I learned throughout this experience.
- I did learn that my teacher’s passion for history died faster than the 9th president, William Harrison and he only had 31 days in office. Side Note: I acquired this fact from my 8th-grade history course
- My history teacher taught me more about rock and roll than my parents did
- Ozzy Osbourne is a legendary artist
- I have no idea what happened in the ’60s and ’70s, government-wise
- Comedy Central’s Drunk History should hire the students from my history class to participate in an episode