Back to school - again

Ugh, week 12.

Oliver! finished last night. We had such a good show, working with those people is heaps of fun. We all agreed that working with the conductor is easy because he doesn't worry about the mistakes. Sometimes when the conductor gets too stressed then it makes the show a real drag. We had great crowds over the two weeks, six shows we did. I'm already looking forward to what the next show might be.

So I have four and a half days to claw my way through before I can have a much needed break. As much as I enjoyed the show it came during the crucial report writing period. I thought that I was just struggling to find things to say but apparently because I have two year 7 classes that I only see once a week then I have a very high number of reports to get through. I made some basic errors that took me ages to go through and fix, however next time I will have a better idea about how to fix those things in the early stages before they get into EVERY SINGLE REPORT.

So that meant that with band and reports and the show I didn't get much sleep for a few weeks. And me on no sleep, plus stress, equals brain meltdown. Stress doesn't affect me in quite the same way that it does other I think. I push it back and get through it, but this time it built up a little too much. I can't describe the feeling of relief that I felt when I finally got to Thursday morning and uploaded them for the last time. I know that there are still some errors in them, but there is only so much I can physically do when I have that many students that I am responsible for.

I have had much smaller classes over the last week, for various reasons. Especially in the year 9 classes where we have been doing a lot of practical stuff for the assembly that they are playing at this week. It is so much easier to get everyone involved when I only have 15 or so to keep a track of. I only have so many guitars! I have been finding that when I am running a prac session that there are at least 6 or 7 students who just don't get involved. They aren't always the same ones in each song, but I can only do so many things at once! Some of them refuse to participate. Only a few of them I would trust to take an instrument somewhere else to practice and know that they will actually focus on the task at hand. Makes life in the classroom difficult. Life would be so much easier if I had a BAND ROOM!

You would think that this is a necessity for a music teacher. It's not that hard to just extend on from where they current classroom is. I need three walls and a roof! One of the walls is already standing! Then we would have the space available to work with a few different groups at a time. I could work on them running their own rehearsals without needing me so much except for answering some of the music questions about how to work something out. However at the school they are all hung up on using this performing arts centre that is already standing. I maintain that it is impractical as it is for the day to day running of a music department. We don't have reliable access to it during the day, we don't have storage over there, which means half and hour to an hour of carting and setting up before any meaningful music can be made. If we were able to use it it would still be impractical because all the resources are fragmented and then we would have to run between buildings constantly to get something from one place or the other. It's a terrible situation as it is because we are suffocating in the space that is available for us. Or not available as the case may be.

Anyway, to bed now and worry about classes and stuff in the morning.