Mid Quarter

Well it's hard to believe that it's mid quarter already. How time flies when you're having fun. I've realized that I haven't written on here as often as I should, so please excuse me for my busyness. I can't begin to describe how busy I've been. The best I can describe is that if I stop moving I feel like I'm going to fall asleep. So during the day I don't notice how exhausting my job is, but that moment I slow down, I can feel it.
This week I gave my high school band a couple concert band pieces. I pulled out First Suite in Eb by Holst and Sleigh Ride. I need to do some adapting because we don't have all of the instrumentation for Holst. They looked at me like I was a little crazy, because my expectations are high. They can play it though. I have lots of faith. The high school choir is going pretty well. We haven't been working on lots of music that we'll sing at Christmas, but I need to order music. 8th grade band is moving along well, but is a talkative group. 7th grade might drive me crazy but they are progressing fairly well. I need to make a lot of phone calls home because I have a couple kids failing. It's always fun to talk to parents.
General music has been fun. We played boomwhackers in several grade leves. If you don't know what those are, they're plastic tubes of different lengths that when hit produce a sound. It's an easy way to show high and low sounds, build a pentatonic scale, play ostinatos, or improvise melody. We used them in kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade. The kids really enjoy them. We've also gotten out percussion instruments and xylophones. It's been fun, but that's what music should be. We tend to be loud as well.
5th grade general music is playing alto recorders. They are having a ball. They only know 3 notes but I've had kids come to my room after school to see if they can take their recorders home. Luckily I had some music printed up. It's great to see how excited they are about it. It's even better when they get noisy in class and I stand there and tell them I'll wait till their quiet before I continue, and they use positive peer pressure to get the rest of the class to be quiet. It's awesome. They are so excited to be playing recorder. They know three notes.
6th grade is playing guitars and autoharp. They are also enjoying it. They know 3 chords, the simplified versions. It's quite exciting to them.
It's been a good week if you don't count what happened thursday that had nothing to do with school. I got a phone call during lunch from my mother asking where my insurance card was for my car. I called her back to ask what was going on. She said my car had been hit. Lots of thoughts went through my head so I asked her what happened. It turns out that the parking brake on one of the parked busses failed. This bus rolled backwards into a car pushing into my car which slid partially sideways 18 inches. This is really hard on a car's axle and transmission. Especially on a new car. I haven't even had my car for a year. Now I've seen a "runaway" bus. I've even chased one. It was a matter of time before something like this happened, but we all hoped it wouldn't. Well this isn't going to be a cheap venture for the school's insurance because one car is totalled and mine needs some serious work. Maybe I should've brought my car with me. Well hindsight is 20/20. It'll all work out.
Till something else exciting comes around, I should write some lesson plans since those need to be emailed in tomorrow morning.