The Monday from Hell

5:48 am: The alarm goes off, but I don't actually wake up until 6:01. The AM station my radio has been stuck on all night blares six headlines in a row without actually giving me any information I can use.

6:45 am: I tell Andrew, who has been crying, whining, and running around with no underwear all morning because he wants the Mater underwear but can't get his jammie shirt off, for the bazillionth time, "big boy voice, please." He decides to have his jelly/tortilla sandwich AND some cereal to take in the car for breakfast.

7:11am: I realize that I forgot to bring the rest of Chloe's muffin, so that my son has two breakfasts and my daughter has had only half a breakfast.

7:12 am: I realize that I also forgot to bring my cell phone.

9:03 am: The "crazy" 5th grade class shows up. I stop two boys from trying to jam a tuning slide into a trombone, and fearing the slide is good and truly stuck, I ask what happened. I get blaming from one and silence from the other. Twenty minutes and two additional teachers later, I am finally told it was an accident.

11:30 am: I wrap up my chord progression-writing assignment with the 6th grade class. We get ready to play, and I give my own personal oboe to my student to use. I only do this if the aforementioned instrument, which I've had since I was 14 (22 years) and toward which I am as protective as my own child, will not leave my immediate sight.

11:35 am: One of my students, a tiny boy whose feet have just begun to grow to gargantuan proportions and over which he therefore has the same control as one might over an untrained 9-month-old Labrador puppy, hustles up to me to ask a question and bumps my big toe with his shoe. The subsequent agony I express causes the noise level in the class to drop to zero.

11:48 am: My repair guy shows up with some fixed instruments and a bill. I decide to show him the weak spring on my (personal) oboe, which, while weak, is still working.

11:49 am: Tom twiddles with the spring. It falls off.

11:50 am: I decide not to burst into tears in front of my class. I decide that running out of the room in hysterics because playing Handel and Bizet up through Saturday on my oboe is now impossible is a bad idea.

11:51 am: I decide to blame Tom for destroying my oboe.

11:52 am: I decide, while trying to pick up the pieces of my class, that Tom really isn't to blame, but I haven't quite decided who is.

11:53 am: I wonder what I am going to do for an oboe for tomorrow's rehearsal and Saturday's concert.

12:17 pm: I call someone who has the number of someone who might possibly let me borrow her oboe, which is the same as mine but newer, thinking that she would be crazy to lend it to me, because I would be crazy to lend mine out if it was going to leave my immediate sight. He doesn't have the number right then but he tells me he'll email it to me.

12:35 pm: I walk into my alternative performance class, which I should be monitoring, except that I can see only a narrow tunnel in front of myself and can think of only my poor unplayable oboe, and hear cussing. Again. I lose it. I then apologize, not with actual words, but by saying something silly and lighthearted.

12:47 pm: I call the someone. Without missing a beat she agrees to loan me her oboe. I decide to bake her several loaves of bread and possibly clean her whole house for her.

12:48 pm: I go with just the bread.

1:01 pm: I call my dad, and burst into tears. (His friend has repaired my oboe in the past. I am convinced that this is not an easy repair.) My dad tells me the spring probably would have bust in the middle of my solo during the concert and I'm lucky. He tells me that an oboe as old as I am is bound to have a few springs bust. He tells me he loves me and that he delights in thinking of me playing my oboe so regularly and enthusiastically again. I burst into more tears.

1:25 pm: I notice that the pain in my toe, while lessened considerably from the initial shock, has not gone away completely, just as my 7th graders walk in the door

1:30-2:22 pm: I give the chord-progression-writing assignment again and experience 7th Grade Spring Fever Hell for fifty-two minutes. I decide that 7th grade is the #1 Worst Idea God Has Ever Had.

2:47 pm: SThe 7th grade students, confused and whiny about their assignment, refuse to leave.

2:48 pm: I am finally able to have a conversation with my children's preschool teacher who tells me that my daughter has had more diarrhea today. This means that at any moment of the rest of my day and week the phone could ring and I will have to drop what I am doing and take her out of school immediately.

2:49 pm: This reminds me that I have no childcare for the dress and concert on Saturday, which reminds me to call my babysitter, which reminds me I forgot my phone.

3:18 pm: I decide to head over to the weight room to lift, because I haven't done that for a while and I promised the gym teacher, who is really good at laying on guilt trips, especially because I owe him about seventeen six-packs of Coors for all the times he's taken the "crazy" 5th grade class in addition to the other one while I was off gallivanting at Large Group and Solo & Ensemble or home with sick kids who refuse to nap or home with cranky well kids because I couldn't find a babysitter, that I would.

3:19 pm: I begin to change my clothes only to discover that I have no sports bra.

3:20 pm: I cop out and decide that I don't want to do any physical activity in public wearing a black satin bra under a white t-shirt.

4:37 pm: I'm ready to go get the kids and go home. There will be an addendum to this post if anything additional Monday-from-Hell-ish happens between now and when I collapse into bed tonight.

Solo & Ensemble

You get to a point with students where you just throw your hands in the air and say, they'll sink or swim on their own.

These last few weeks since the Large Group Contest have been a bit haphazard, with state tests and holidays and stuff like that interfering with the kids' time in class to prepare. It was this week that I had to say, sink or swim.

I was out of the middle-high band class for one day, and during the time they had a sub I realized that without me to keep a lid on them, they would not do what they were supposed to do.

So today I told them to get their instruments out and sit, we would have a master class. Basically, what I told them, was that they needed to prove to me they were ready or go home and practice over the four-day weekend. If they didn't come get their instruments after school I'd call home and find out what the problem was.

I wish I could have lined them up across the back wall, such was my mood. However, I let them sit where they felt comfortable and had them stay silent, or try. One by one, they came up and played for me. Most of them I got all the way through, some I stopped halfway because I was satisfied with their progress one way or the other.

I told the kids that I just needed to know so I didn't lose sleep. (Not that I'm losing sleep over that, I'm losing sleep over dreams about astronauts and rockets.) But it was also to show who was ready and who was not.

At one point one kid asked why we were not giving feedback. I said, the time for feedback is over. You all know what you need to work on. Some of them came up and futzed with their reeds trying to blame their lack of progress or tone quality on that, and I said, it's not the reed, it's your brain. I offered constructive criticism to those I knew would take it, and made sure the rest of the class knew what they needed to do.

I got through about 2/3 of this class of 7th-8th-9th graders. I sure as heck am not going to lose any sleep over THEM. It's the Rachmaninoff accompaniment I'm worried about.