Reminiscing...
Another lazy day. I spent an inordinate amount of time doing logic puzzles today. It still astounds me that after years of doing them, there's some bit of logic I cannot comprehend. It's really annoying, actually. What's worse--the books I'm used to (Penny Press) will go through the problems step by step; the one I'm working out of now (Games) just gives the answers. Sometimes I need to know how to get there, not where I'm ending up.
I finally sort of cleaned my room. This is a big thing for me; I do not recall the last time I dusted. It's one thing to be a bum; it's another when you throw a messy bird into the mix. (I *will* have to clean his cage soon, too. I have the paper and the vacuum poised to go into action...but the logic puzzles called my name. The Siren Song wasn't as strong as this. Have I mentioned I just spent three hours watching more Gilmore Girls while cleaning?) My dad got me this great wooden picture box for Christmas a couple of years ago. It has twelve wooden holders, each with twelve sleeves. Of course, I had to sit and look through all the pictures and remember as best I could what was going on then. There are some I remember better than others. Most of the pictures have to do with Christmas, although there are a couple birthday pics and weddings stuck in there. There are ones from mom's baby shower; the joke was that I was going to be a boy, so there are signs referring to me as "Oscar," including a picture of Oscar the Grouch. I have no idea how that came about. There are pictures of bunches of relatives, with some of them gone now. The only person I didn't know was my grandfather, my dad's dad, who died when I was three. The story goes, he and the dog went for a walk, and only the dog came back. He had a heart attack in the alley. My grandfather looked like an old, old man in those pictures. I have no idea how old he really was. I'll have to dig up a prayer card. It's strange to look at the pictures from my second birthday. That would have been Thanksgiving 1979. I'm sitting on a rug, which is the same rug my grandmother had in her place up in Lake Geneva. Grandma had these odd things--I'm not sure what they were. They were black and orange and bulbous at one end and sharp at the other, and I had a ball just pushing them into this styrofoam cup. I do remember that, vaguely. What gets me are the ages of mom and grandma. Mom would have been 25. That's two years younger than I am now. Grandma was 47--younger than mom is now. It just blows my mind, in a way, to compare myself and my mom to herself and her mom at similar ages. How different they looked, how different our lives are.
How different is my life from just last year? I gave you fair warning; here's where I was one year ago:
This was my first big thing since becoming a band director: Band Contest. Not only were all of my students involved, the Buffalo Grove school hosts the contest. It's a Catholic School band festival, though there is one non-Catholic school that comes along, Grove. It is the biggest and one of the best schools that goes--they rival the Senior Band of the Hoffman Estates school. (That particular band, at times, plays better than my *college* band.) Our smallest schools, from Northbrook, Deerfield, and Barrington, were small enough that we combined them into one big Senior Band and one big Junior Band. That actually worked out nicely, as all the parts complemented each other. Plus, considering the Northbrook school's Junior Band consisted of six kids, well, we weren't going to put them out there by themselves. (The biggest Junior Band of the three had just eleven in it--still not much to work with.)
The day started out like a normal day--I got there between 6:30 and 7--except it was a Saturday. Cruel, cruel, I tell you. Luckily by then I was used to getting up far too early in the morning. There wasn't too much to do at first, aside from making sure all the scores were in the envelopes. This contest wasn't a competition; each band gets based on its own merits. Each of the three judges got copies of each of the three songs the bands played and they followed along as the bands performed. There was a checklist of about a dozen items on which each group was rated; the highest score, then, was 120 (I think). I forget the breakdown of points, but anything over 100 meant you were an amazing group.
I was warned to wear comfortable shoes, but when you're a girl and you're dressed nicely, comfort tends to go out the window. I wore my same old black heels that I always wear. They did have inserts in them to presumably make them better, but I was on my feet for...about nine hours, and gone from my house for probably around thirteen. I do recall, after much of the festivities were over, taking off my shoes and walking around on the cool tile floor trying to revive my tootsies from their Barbie-like state. It took a while. I was also wearing this really nice blouse that I'd bought when I had gone on a "oh my God I'm going to be a teacher I'd better get some nice clothes" spree and hadn't put on since. When I put it on before I left in the morning, I realized it was, well, kinda slutty for me. The first button didn't start until just above the middle of my bra. Holy crap. And, of course, I'm freaking out about this because I had nothing--NOTHING--else to wear or substitute, and there I was, going to be in front of a bunch of Catholic school parents in this slutty top and I am SO not slutty, I never even rolled my skirt when I was one of those Catholic school kids. Oh my God. So that started the day off just fine.
One of our groups was one of the earliest bands. I think it was Hoffman Estates Junior. And, of course, Mr. C told me to conduct them. You want *me*, the person who has NEVER conducted like this before, to do it in CONTEST? *has flashbacks to seventh grade when, just a couple weeks after starting tenor sax, my band had contest...I swear I was the reason my band got a second, because I didn't learn until about a decade later that you're supposed to wet the reed before you play; pretty much all I did was squeak, and it was horrible* Great. Okay. Throw me to the wolves. What's worse--I discovered that when I'm extremely horrendously nervous, that I sweat. Profusely. In places I have never sweat before. So there I was, in this delicate blouse, sweat POURING down my back, with my back facing the audience...oh, it was bad. Luckily, my band ROCKED. Holy crap, it was awesome. I kept looking at them and smiling after each song. We got through it unscathed. It did help that there were a number of older players, including eighth graders, who played in this band, but the vast majority were beginners.
Okay. With that done, I set to work walking the halls and checking on my students in the classrooms. They weren't warm-up rooms; the kids were to just wait in them and drop off their stuff. I don't think we even allowed them to take out their instruments until just before they went down to the band warm-up room. I had a walkie-talkie with me, but mine wasn't working properly. I know I tried to use it, but gave up on it after a while. The I-Band kids from BG were driving me nuts. That's their home school, remember, and they knew the kids in that classroom (3rd grade) because they were secret pals or some other school project. One girl's little sister was in that room, too, so she was playing with her sister's stuff, I think.
For the most part, I got to see all of our bands perform. The only conflict involved BG's Junior Band and one of the combined bands (can't remember which). Mr. C, who did the scheduling, thought he'd worked it out so that there weren't any conflicts initially. There's a forty-minute window where the bands have to warm up (20 minutes) and perform (20 minutes), and a director has to be with them at all times. Unfortunately, the BG and combined kids were back to back, so one of us had to be with BG (me) and the other had to be with the combo (Mr. C). That's how I got to direct in the first place--he physically couldn't. So then he figured, if she's doing one band, why not do another? Heck, he made me run the HE Junior Band rehearsal, so they were more used to me directing than him. Shocking, because I'm a horrible conductor, but oh well. So, okay, he was up with the combined band, and I was down with the little kids. They've never tuned before, but because it's contest, we've got to sound relatively close to each other. Bad. Very, very bad. We should have practiced this more...or at all. I only got half the band done (and not the ones that really needed it) before it was time to go. So we go in, and sit down, and begin to play...and it was all I could do to keep from wincing. The saxes were about a half-step high, the clarinets were a half-step low, and no matter who was playing with whom, it just sounded terrible. Get cotton balls from the nurse, because everyone's ears were bleeding. It was breathtakingly awful. It was the proverbial train wreck, and there was nothing I could do except wave my arm and cue the trumpets. I wanted to cry, but that wasn't an option. It wasn't just the intonation, though; some of the kids got lost, so the music wasn't where it should have been. Oh well. Live and learn.
I mentioned that the bands were graded on their own merits; they weren't compared to one another. This meant there were more than one firsts handed out. In fact, all but two of our eight competing bands received firsts. Big guess as to which of the two I conducted got a second. The other second-place band was the BG Senior Band, which I knew following their performance. It was just weak. Mainly, it was the trumpets. They talked the talk but they couldn't walk the walk. They're all big and brassy in rehearsal, but put them in front of an audience and they deflate. Imagine Sasha Cohen with a horn. And once the first-chair player collapsed, it didn't take long for the rest of the section to go, "Oh, crap." And when that happened, some of the rest of the band went, too. It was like dominoes toppling. It wasn't quite as painful as the Juniors, but it was more disappointing. Those kids can play way better than that. They just didn't want it as badly. What was good, though, was that the I-Band kids did get a first. That really pumped them up, knowing they beat the Senior Band kids (about half the I-Band was also in Senior Band--all sixth graders are automatically in both). We told them we'd take them out for ice cream if they'd beat Senior Band; we never did, but we gave them all candy bars at the end of the year, which was just as good to them. (And they were free--they were left over from the Contest concessions.)
The one truly fun moment I remember: The moms had set up info tables by the front office, and I was talking to some of them when one of my Deerfield Junior Band students came up to me. She happily exclaimed, "We got a first!" and started jumping up and down. I was excited, too, so I started jumping up and down with her. The moms were all like, "You're so cute!" They were all surprised that at the end of the day I was still smiling. What can I say--I'm young, and my adrenaline was pumping like mad.
There was also a random nice moment. I wish I could recall the whole thing; I think I wrote it down in my journal. I was in one of the classrooms talking to my students as they were cleaning up their things when this older couple came up to me. The man asked if I was one of the *blank* twins (don't remember the name); I said, no, I'm Miss W, one of the band directors here. He said something like, I've been watching you, and you have a wonderful way with the kids. They really respond to you. He also said that I was a genuine person (I had to go look that up). It was all very odd, but sweet. I really wonder who he was, why he was there. It did help make the day more special. (Of course, I thought, he must not have seen me yelling at the kids down in the band room. I've done a bit of screaming in my time.)
Mrs. S stopped by. She's the one who went on maternity leave. She and her husband and their ten-day-old baby came by around eleven-thirty. This was the first time any of us had seen the baby, so everyone was thrilled. They even came to lunch with us (directors and judges in the teachers' lounge--I stuck mainly to fruit because it was Lent and because, well, I didn't wish to become a human trombone). She looked good, and the baby was beautiful.
At the end of the day a couple of BG families stayed to help with the cleanup. One family had three kids go through band, though only one was currently a student. The middle one, a girl, was a freshman in high school who really really really really really wanted to be a counselor at camp and pleaded madly with Mr. C and me to let her in. We were like, hon, be quiet and we'll think about it. (She made it in.)
When all was said and done, Mr. C, Mr. L (a friend and conductor of about four schools at contest) and I went out for dinner. Mr. C drove me so I wouldn't have to worry about getting lost or anything; it was actually at a place I passed all the time on the way to Northbrook. It's in Wheeling, on Dundee Road just west of the railroad tracks. McHenry might be the cross-street. Mr. C is very picky about food, but he likes going there because he can smoke cigars and get liquor. Yes, quality. It was nice to relax, though, and I was so thankful the day was over.
I finally sort of cleaned my room. This is a big thing for me; I do not recall the last time I dusted. It's one thing to be a bum; it's another when you throw a messy bird into the mix. (I *will* have to clean his cage soon, too. I have the paper and the vacuum poised to go into action...but the logic puzzles called my name. The Siren Song wasn't as strong as this. Have I mentioned I just spent three hours watching more Gilmore Girls while cleaning?) My dad got me this great wooden picture box for Christmas a couple of years ago. It has twelve wooden holders, each with twelve sleeves. Of course, I had to sit and look through all the pictures and remember as best I could what was going on then. There are some I remember better than others. Most of the pictures have to do with Christmas, although there are a couple birthday pics and weddings stuck in there. There are ones from mom's baby shower; the joke was that I was going to be a boy, so there are signs referring to me as "Oscar," including a picture of Oscar the Grouch. I have no idea how that came about. There are pictures of bunches of relatives, with some of them gone now. The only person I didn't know was my grandfather, my dad's dad, who died when I was three. The story goes, he and the dog went for a walk, and only the dog came back. He had a heart attack in the alley. My grandfather looked like an old, old man in those pictures. I have no idea how old he really was. I'll have to dig up a prayer card. It's strange to look at the pictures from my second birthday. That would have been Thanksgiving 1979. I'm sitting on a rug, which is the same rug my grandmother had in her place up in Lake Geneva. Grandma had these odd things--I'm not sure what they were. They were black and orange and bulbous at one end and sharp at the other, and I had a ball just pushing them into this styrofoam cup. I do remember that, vaguely. What gets me are the ages of mom and grandma. Mom would have been 25. That's two years younger than I am now. Grandma was 47--younger than mom is now. It just blows my mind, in a way, to compare myself and my mom to herself and her mom at similar ages. How different they looked, how different our lives are.
How different is my life from just last year? I gave you fair warning; here's where I was one year ago:
This was my first big thing since becoming a band director: Band Contest. Not only were all of my students involved, the Buffalo Grove school hosts the contest. It's a Catholic School band festival, though there is one non-Catholic school that comes along, Grove. It is the biggest and one of the best schools that goes--they rival the Senior Band of the Hoffman Estates school. (That particular band, at times, plays better than my *college* band.) Our smallest schools, from Northbrook, Deerfield, and Barrington, were small enough that we combined them into one big Senior Band and one big Junior Band. That actually worked out nicely, as all the parts complemented each other. Plus, considering the Northbrook school's Junior Band consisted of six kids, well, we weren't going to put them out there by themselves. (The biggest Junior Band of the three had just eleven in it--still not much to work with.)
The day started out like a normal day--I got there between 6:30 and 7--except it was a Saturday. Cruel, cruel, I tell you. Luckily by then I was used to getting up far too early in the morning. There wasn't too much to do at first, aside from making sure all the scores were in the envelopes. This contest wasn't a competition; each band gets based on its own merits. Each of the three judges got copies of each of the three songs the bands played and they followed along as the bands performed. There was a checklist of about a dozen items on which each group was rated; the highest score, then, was 120 (I think). I forget the breakdown of points, but anything over 100 meant you were an amazing group.
I was warned to wear comfortable shoes, but when you're a girl and you're dressed nicely, comfort tends to go out the window. I wore my same old black heels that I always wear. They did have inserts in them to presumably make them better, but I was on my feet for...about nine hours, and gone from my house for probably around thirteen. I do recall, after much of the festivities were over, taking off my shoes and walking around on the cool tile floor trying to revive my tootsies from their Barbie-like state. It took a while. I was also wearing this really nice blouse that I'd bought when I had gone on a "oh my God I'm going to be a teacher I'd better get some nice clothes" spree and hadn't put on since. When I put it on before I left in the morning, I realized it was, well, kinda slutty for me. The first button didn't start until just above the middle of my bra. Holy crap. And, of course, I'm freaking out about this because I had nothing--NOTHING--else to wear or substitute, and there I was, going to be in front of a bunch of Catholic school parents in this slutty top and I am SO not slutty, I never even rolled my skirt when I was one of those Catholic school kids. Oh my God. So that started the day off just fine.
One of our groups was one of the earliest bands. I think it was Hoffman Estates Junior. And, of course, Mr. C told me to conduct them. You want *me*, the person who has NEVER conducted like this before, to do it in CONTEST? *has flashbacks to seventh grade when, just a couple weeks after starting tenor sax, my band had contest...I swear I was the reason my band got a second, because I didn't learn until about a decade later that you're supposed to wet the reed before you play; pretty much all I did was squeak, and it was horrible* Great. Okay. Throw me to the wolves. What's worse--I discovered that when I'm extremely horrendously nervous, that I sweat. Profusely. In places I have never sweat before. So there I was, in this delicate blouse, sweat POURING down my back, with my back facing the audience...oh, it was bad. Luckily, my band ROCKED. Holy crap, it was awesome. I kept looking at them and smiling after each song. We got through it unscathed. It did help that there were a number of older players, including eighth graders, who played in this band, but the vast majority were beginners.
Okay. With that done, I set to work walking the halls and checking on my students in the classrooms. They weren't warm-up rooms; the kids were to just wait in them and drop off their stuff. I don't think we even allowed them to take out their instruments until just before they went down to the band warm-up room. I had a walkie-talkie with me, but mine wasn't working properly. I know I tried to use it, but gave up on it after a while. The I-Band kids from BG were driving me nuts. That's their home school, remember, and they knew the kids in that classroom (3rd grade) because they were secret pals or some other school project. One girl's little sister was in that room, too, so she was playing with her sister's stuff, I think.
For the most part, I got to see all of our bands perform. The only conflict involved BG's Junior Band and one of the combined bands (can't remember which). Mr. C, who did the scheduling, thought he'd worked it out so that there weren't any conflicts initially. There's a forty-minute window where the bands have to warm up (20 minutes) and perform (20 minutes), and a director has to be with them at all times. Unfortunately, the BG and combined kids were back to back, so one of us had to be with BG (me) and the other had to be with the combo (Mr. C). That's how I got to direct in the first place--he physically couldn't. So then he figured, if she's doing one band, why not do another? Heck, he made me run the HE Junior Band rehearsal, so they were more used to me directing than him. Shocking, because I'm a horrible conductor, but oh well. So, okay, he was up with the combined band, and I was down with the little kids. They've never tuned before, but because it's contest, we've got to sound relatively close to each other. Bad. Very, very bad. We should have practiced this more...or at all. I only got half the band done (and not the ones that really needed it) before it was time to go. So we go in, and sit down, and begin to play...and it was all I could do to keep from wincing. The saxes were about a half-step high, the clarinets were a half-step low, and no matter who was playing with whom, it just sounded terrible. Get cotton balls from the nurse, because everyone's ears were bleeding. It was breathtakingly awful. It was the proverbial train wreck, and there was nothing I could do except wave my arm and cue the trumpets. I wanted to cry, but that wasn't an option. It wasn't just the intonation, though; some of the kids got lost, so the music wasn't where it should have been. Oh well. Live and learn.
I mentioned that the bands were graded on their own merits; they weren't compared to one another. This meant there were more than one firsts handed out. In fact, all but two of our eight competing bands received firsts. Big guess as to which of the two I conducted got a second. The other second-place band was the BG Senior Band, which I knew following their performance. It was just weak. Mainly, it was the trumpets. They talked the talk but they couldn't walk the walk. They're all big and brassy in rehearsal, but put them in front of an audience and they deflate. Imagine Sasha Cohen with a horn. And once the first-chair player collapsed, it didn't take long for the rest of the section to go, "Oh, crap." And when that happened, some of the rest of the band went, too. It was like dominoes toppling. It wasn't quite as painful as the Juniors, but it was more disappointing. Those kids can play way better than that. They just didn't want it as badly. What was good, though, was that the I-Band kids did get a first. That really pumped them up, knowing they beat the Senior Band kids (about half the I-Band was also in Senior Band--all sixth graders are automatically in both). We told them we'd take them out for ice cream if they'd beat Senior Band; we never did, but we gave them all candy bars at the end of the year, which was just as good to them. (And they were free--they were left over from the Contest concessions.)
The one truly fun moment I remember: The moms had set up info tables by the front office, and I was talking to some of them when one of my Deerfield Junior Band students came up to me. She happily exclaimed, "We got a first!" and started jumping up and down. I was excited, too, so I started jumping up and down with her. The moms were all like, "You're so cute!" They were all surprised that at the end of the day I was still smiling. What can I say--I'm young, and my adrenaline was pumping like mad.
There was also a random nice moment. I wish I could recall the whole thing; I think I wrote it down in my journal. I was in one of the classrooms talking to my students as they were cleaning up their things when this older couple came up to me. The man asked if I was one of the *blank* twins (don't remember the name); I said, no, I'm Miss W, one of the band directors here. He said something like, I've been watching you, and you have a wonderful way with the kids. They really respond to you. He also said that I was a genuine person (I had to go look that up). It was all very odd, but sweet. I really wonder who he was, why he was there. It did help make the day more special. (Of course, I thought, he must not have seen me yelling at the kids down in the band room. I've done a bit of screaming in my time.)
Mrs. S stopped by. She's the one who went on maternity leave. She and her husband and their ten-day-old baby came by around eleven-thirty. This was the first time any of us had seen the baby, so everyone was thrilled. They even came to lunch with us (directors and judges in the teachers' lounge--I stuck mainly to fruit because it was Lent and because, well, I didn't wish to become a human trombone). She looked good, and the baby was beautiful.
At the end of the day a couple of BG families stayed to help with the cleanup. One family had three kids go through band, though only one was currently a student. The middle one, a girl, was a freshman in high school who really really really really really wanted to be a counselor at camp and pleaded madly with Mr. C and me to let her in. We were like, hon, be quiet and we'll think about it. (She made it in.)
When all was said and done, Mr. C, Mr. L (a friend and conductor of about four schools at contest) and I went out for dinner. Mr. C drove me so I wouldn't have to worry about getting lost or anything; it was actually at a place I passed all the time on the way to Northbrook. It's in Wheeling, on Dundee Road just west of the railroad tracks. McHenry might be the cross-street. Mr. C is very picky about food, but he likes going there because he can smoke cigars and get liquor. Yes, quality. It was nice to relax, though, and I was so thankful the day was over.