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Home > Archive > Oct 3, 2007

Snow Canyon Students Get 'Schooled' in Rock
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
From the beginning days of R & B to the '80s era of Pat Benatar, Run DMC, Def Leppard and Guns 'N Roses, rock 'n' roll is the latest subject of study offered to students at Snow Canyon High School.
“The funny part is that parents came and talked to me at parent teacher conference and were just like, 'I heard you're teaching about the Beatles. I went and saw them in concert! I have all their albums!'” SCHS teacher Charlie Kerr said. “It's just funny hearing about it – they're all excited for their kids, and it's kind of funny to hear that. Maybe the parents are more excited than the kids are!”
Kerr, who teaches band at SCHS, is now heading up the school's new rock history class, instructing his nearly 70 students in the finer points of rock 'n' roll's origins and the decades of development of that musical genre.
Tucked into the school's class schedule as simply “Music Aesthetics,” this rock history class began experimentally last year as a one-class-period endeavor. Positive response has given the class a more permanent foothold at SCHS, and there are now four sections being taught – two during the fall semester and two in the spring. Students can receive either elective credit or fine arts credit for taking the class, Kerr said.
“They have to graduate with one-and-a-half credits of fine arts,” he said. “They either have to take band, choir, orchestra for a year-and-a-half, or ceramics, or we have an art class; and then, now, we have this class.”
Formerly, Kerr taught a guitar class at SCHS during the rock history timeslot, but issues began occurring, with guitars being damaged, broken or stolen. A possible solution to the problem would have been installing guitar lockers in the band room, he said, but lockers would have cost thousands of dollars, which the school didn't have a budget for. Exploration began for alternatives to the guitar class, and a teacher in northern Utah told Kerr about a popular rock history course being taught at his school. After some discussion, administrators decided to try the class out at Snow Canyon.
“The kids like it,” Kerr said. “I'm not teaching it like you would a regular history class, where there's standardized testing and things of that nature. We can be a little more free, and that way, it's a little less pressure, so I think the kids have more fun that way. Plus, we listen to music! Lots of music.”
From The Byrds to The Beatles, musical sounds of bygone eras are what students in Kerr's class are being exposed to and taught about. But though the class is a departure from the typical music appreciation course, make no mistake – in Kerr's class, it's not all fun, games and jamming out to tunes.
“It does teach history as history,” Kerr said. “I think kids might think the class is just going to be sitting around listening to music and just talking, but there's a lot of stuff to discuss.”
“It's kind of funny,” he went on to say. “If kids think it'll be really fun, I'm like, 'Guys, we're going to be listening to music that you're not necessarily going to like, whether it be Elvis Presley or the Temptations or The Beatles or whatever.' I just try to let the kids understand, or try to, hopefully, help them gain an appreciation that, 'Okay, I might not like this music, but without it, there would be none of the music that I listen to today.'”
For the most part, the class has been well received by the students, Kerr said, and the kids are being exposed to facts and knowledge about modern music's history that they had no idea about before.
“These kids, half of them, thought Elvis Presley invented rock 'n' roll, and that's not the case,” he said.
Utilizing a college textbook that teaches all about the history of rock, Kerr began setting such misunderstandings straight for his pupils. He started the semester's rock 'n' roll instruction with studies of the genre's early origins, rooted in R & B, country western and '50s pop.
“Elvis Presley had a background in all three of those and was able to bring it together, but R & B was definitely the precursor,” Kerr said. “I could play some R & B stuff for you, and you'd think it's just early rock 'n' roll – you know, you have the drum, you have the electric bass, you have the saxophone.”
After starting out with the chapter on those early rock roots, Kerr's class has now gone on to a study of The Beatles. Beatlemania spans three class sessions, he said, because, after all, the Fab Four largely shaped rock 'n' roll and set the stage for what it has become today.
“That was the big turnaround for rock in the '60s, was what The Beatles were able to accomplish,” he said. “They opened up all kinds of new doors for different styles of rock that no one had even explored yet.”
Next up for Snow Canyon's rock studies will be the British Invasion, which brought to the American music scene such bands as the Rolling Stones and The Who. The class will then continue through '70s rock and on into the '80s by the time the semester concludes, Kerr said.
Times have changed since rock first rolled out and parents shunned the genre as evil music. In contrast to moms and dads of the '50s and '60s, the parents of the SCHS students in Kerr's class are thrilled to have their teens learning about the music they, themselves, loved as teenagers.
“A mom came in last week and says, 'My kid went out and bought the 'Revolver' album!'” Kerr said. “So that's kind of cool – he's listening to The Beatles.”

Snow Canyon's rock history class is short on funding, so anyone interested in donating rock 'n' roll CDs and other music items to the class should contact Charlie Kerr at Snow Canyon High School, 634-1967.

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