Tuesday Musings

Tuesday... When I woke up this morning I couldn't believe that it was only Tuesday. Yesterday I got out of bed right at the first alarm. I always do the Monday after a long break. Today I slept in an extra half-hour. Still had time to go to Starbucks.

It turned out to be a give-take kind of day.

On one hand, I felt particularly on-the-ball in band and music theory. It was just one of those days where everything clicked... especially in theory. We got down and gritty with a Mozart serenade - doing full harmonic analysis, identifying the phrases, periods and cadences and naming the form. It was awesome.

On the other hand, I had a few things that I procrastinated on that came back and bit me in the ass. Chief among them was the paperwork for the vocal festival that I was supposed to fill out weeks ago. Well, I checked on-line today and saw that the festival I really wanted to go to is now closed.

Crap.

On the Palpatine front: I returned to my office to find several students huddled on the couch. They looked at me in fear when I walked in... one of them said "Don't tell him, he'll just freak out."

"Don't tell me what?"

"Ummm.... have you seen the course offerings for next year?"

"No."

"AP Music Theory isn't on it."

"Yeah, I fugured as much... it's okay"

"Marching Band is..."

"Yeah I knew about that too..."

The truth: The counselor came to me the week before our break and told me that Palpatine wants to add a Marching Band class to the schedule. Actually, she wants to call it 'Drum Line' but there's no listing for it at the district level. She also wanted to make it a 0 period class.

*Sigh* oh that lady.

I'm officially reccomending to her that in her enthusiasm for the drum line she doesn't a) split it off from the band class b) throw a whole bunch of kids in it that don't want to be there c) fill it with kids who have never played drums before.

I am going to reccomend that she d) splits the band class into beginning and advanced classes and e) keeps the drum line in 3rd period band so that we can have combined band-drumline projects.

Maybe she'll buy it.... or maybe she'll say "No, we have to make your program GROW! It will be okay, you'll see. You can handle it."

In the mean time, the only thing close enough to "Drum Line" they could put on the sheet was "Marching Band." The counselor seems to think that if not many kids sign up for it, that she can go to Palpatine and say "Can we really fly this class? It doesn't have enough recruits." But see, knowing Palpatine, she'll just find students to put in it.

We'll see.

What I really find amusing... some students who were really interested in taking AP Music Theory are trying to rally enough people to keep it afloat. There's even a "Save AP Music Theory" Facebook group. Awesome.

Hey, if they can find 25-30 people who will do it... who knows?