Introduction

 

The pages in the "History" portion of this tutorial are written as informal lectures. They make liberal use of first and second person pronouns, and have a tone that is more conversational than the pages in the section "The Organ and How It Works."

One additional feature found in the history pages is the presence of review quizzes. At the end of each page, there is link to a short quiz that covers the material of the page. The quizzes are rather general in nature, and they are made up almost entirely of multiple choice questions. They are not meant to be comprehensive tests of the material; they're there as guidelines to the high points.

At the end of each quiz, there is a button which is used to submit the quiz - - an electronic analog to "turning in a paper." At that point, only some machinery will read your paper. It will also pop a response back to you, with some electronic back- patting for correct answers, but no corrections for the ones you missed. The important point here is that I'll never know what you said in response to any of the questions. You can rest secure in the knowledge that the machinery will not think ill of you if you give it wrong answers. That could actually free you up to use these quizzes in another way: take the quiz before you read the page. Then take it again after you've read the page and see if your score improves. And don't worry about the quiz asking for your name; that information is used solely to "personalize" the feed-back the machine gives you after you are done.

The copyright notice at the bottom of each page is also a link to my e-mail address, so you can get in touch with me if you'd like to do so. I'd particularly appreciate any suggestions you have for improving the tutorial. I hope you find it helpful.