What's My Band Playing?

The school year is now in full swing, and my rehearsals for band and chorus have begun. My students are starting to dust off their instruments and are attempting to play the music I have chosen for them. Choosing music is actually a rather difficult task. There aren't many good pieces written for middle school, especially for chorus. Don't get me wrong, there are some very pretty melodies written for middle school chorus that have all the right voice ranges for that age group, but I have a policy where I do not give the students anything to sing that I would be ashamed to sing in front of an audience myself. Trite lyrics just don't fly in my book. Every fall and spring, I am sent CD's of sample music that makes me cringe. Take this, for example:

This Old Hammer

The site won't let me give you the page directly, so you're going to have to do a little work. Type in "This Old Hammer Roger Emerson". If you dare, please click on "see and hear the music" where you can hear an audio sample of this... thing. Umm, my chorus would laugh in my face if I gave this to them. Wait, I take that back. They like and respect me too much to do that, but they SHOULD laugh. It makes me shiver. Whenever I get mad at the Philosopher King, I just pop that CD in for us both to enjoy.

Picking out band music is not nearly as painful. I gave my band the music to "Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. Middle school kids seem to love Grieg. His music is fun, his name is fun to pronounce, and there are some great arrangements out there for kiddies. Anyway, their eyes got really big when I passed out the music today. Granted, there are a lot of notes, but once they actually started to play those notes I had them in the palm of my hand. As one of my students told me yesterday in chorus, "Man, you have GREAT taste in music!" And that's why I'm the master ;)

Newfie Screech

As you can probably tell, these pictures aren't all in order. The ones towards the bottom were taken before the wedding, and most of the other ones were taken after the wedding and during the reception, except for the one random picture of Matt in the car. The whole trip was quite beautiful.

Always Room for One More

It has certainly been a while since I have posted anything, and I sincerely apologize! Life has been a little crazy lately. The Philosopher King and I have moved to the town in which I work. I am now about a 7 minute drive away from school, and we are out of the city. We are renting a house rather than an apartment, and although it's a little rough around the edges, we are much happier. We have a nice backyard and a back porch! Life is good.

We had barely begun to unpack our stuff when it was time for us to travel to Newfoundland for Nate and Michelle's wedding. I tried to take lots of pictures, and I will be posting some of them here. I wanted to make Megan feel like she had been there, so I'm going to send all of the pictures to her. Megan, we also have a little package for you, because you were certainly missed!

I am a little disappointed, because I realized right before we got onto the ferry to go to Newfoundland that the batteries in my camera were dead. I tried to replace them when we got to Harbour Breton, but the batteries I received there only worked for 2 pictures. It's a shame, because Harbour Breton was absolutely gorgeous. The good news is that I was able to replace the batteries in time for the wedding.

I have 2 videos to share from the wedding. The sound quality isn't that great, but the first one is of Ben's speech:



The second one is of Michelle and Nathan speaking:



I will share some pictures later. It's time to get back to unpacking!

Walking Towards the Sunrise

This is a song that was written this weekend by Ryan (Matt's cousin), Gus (Ryan's friend), Matt and me. We were at camp when I convinced these boys that we should write a song together. Ryan didn't think we could do it, but I told him that I make all my seventh grade students write songs and that it would be good for him. Ryan and Matt wrote the lyrics, and Gus and I wrote the chords and melody. We stayed up until 2:00 am and then performed it later in the afternoon. I don't think it turned out too bad. We didn't practice very much before we performed it, so Gus and I kind of screwed up the ending. Overall I think we did a pretty good job. It was so much fun!

300

I don't know how much sense this video is going to make if you haven't seen the movie, but I think that this is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Well, not counting the David Hasselhoff video Megan posted today, which was also hilarious... Enjoy!

Somewhere Only We Know

I find myself regularly clicking on this video on YouTube. The piano player is so much fun to watch.

The Crazies are Out

So last night my husband and I were in the kitchen. He had just finished playing a round of golf with one of his buddies, where he picked up some startling information. He said to me, "So it looks like [name of his buddy's friend] is in jail for beating up his girlfriend." I think my mouth dropped open a little bit, and he said, "Does that really surprise you?"

I had to think a minute, because this guy really is a complete jerk. He likes to wave his money around and be something of a playboy. Usually I don't really notice him because I'm too busy thinking about what a complete jerk my husband's buddy is (for those of you who know the story, I'm referring to the groomsman who got kicked out of the wedding party). Still, it did surprise me, shock me in fact. It usually shocks me when people do evil things. People do them all the time, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised, but I am.

Since I've been on summer break, I've been reading a lot of news stories on the Internet. This is probably bad for me because it gets me all riled up and then gives me nightmares later. The violence that happens in this country is so sick and disgusting. How can people treat each other like this? What would make a man want to bite off the upper lip and ear of a 3-year-old girl? Why would a group of people torture a boy in a closet, drop his mother's head a few times on some tile and then laugh when she's dead? On July 4th, two kids, ages 1 and 6 were caught in a crossfire and got shot in a park. In another instance, a man lay beat up and tortured in his own basement while his partner was raped upstairs. And what about crimes of indifference? A woman lay bleeding in a store from stab wounds while people walked over her and one person even took a picture with her cell phone. No one tried to help her, and she died. Women get beat up and/or shot by men they trust, and children are abused everyday.

What's wrong with people?! Maybe I'm just naive or overly sensitive, but it really shocks me when I read stories of people intentionally trying to physically hurt other people. These people don't live by the rules of society and shouldn't really be allowed to enjoy the benefits of society, including jail. I say we find some way to put these idiots back into some state of nature and let them fend for themselves where they will be away from society. They won't get the "gangsta coolness" of jailtime if they're out in the desert with no clothes. Of course they'd probably just band together to form their own society and eventually bomb us and stuff... I just wish these people would straighten out and have more appreciation for life!