Music Ed?

Honestly, it's much too late to be starting something like this, but I thought since I haven't written anything in a good long while, it's probably time I updated it.  These past two weeks and weekends have been insanely busy!  Yesterday (Saturday), a bunch of us helped out at the Junior District auditions with MENC, which was like a much less crazy repetition of the All-State auditions of the previous Saturday.  We didn't do much all day.  But All-State auditions were great fun!  I ended up running score sheets back and forth between two rooms with a judge in each room.  One of the judges is a teacher at school, so it was lovely working with her all day.  The other judge I didn't know, but she was very nice, so it was an excellent opportunity to meet new people.  I had a great time talking to all the students auditioning, many of whom assumed that I was just a high school student that had volunteered to be there.  While the volunteering part was true, the high school part was not, and they were often surprised to hear that I am in fact a junior in college, not a junior in high school.  Oh well.  I guess there's not too much of a difference in appearance between those two ages....?  Who knows.  

Aside from that, it was a great experience, and I really enjoyed being on the other side of the audition process.  Auditions in high school typically didn't make me too nervous simply because of the number of them I participated in - there gets to be some sort of normalcy and routine because of their similarity to each other.  Some general observations: most of the kids were very concerned about whether the judge was nice or not, and seemed exceptionally relieved when I told them she was.  She was very amused by the fact that they'd walk out of the room exclaiming, "She is SO NICE!"  At one point she said, "Wouldn't it be awful if they walked out and I overheard them saying, 'Ugh, she's such a jerk!'"  Another thing: your attitude about something, even if it's incredibly tiring, has an enormous effect on the way the day is perceived at the end.  I smiled all day, and I thought it was the most fun I'd had in a good long while.  Maybe I just smile too much...like my oboe teacher freshman year told me...but I like smiling.  It's been scientifically proven that if you smile, you feel better.  So if you feel unhappy, smile anyway, because it releases endorphins, which make you happy.  And lastly: I like being a music major again.  I feel like I've gone through a roller coaster ride coming to that conclusion, and I've certainly involved enough (if not too many) people in deciding, but maybe I just had to find the right niche.  All-State auditions combined with my Elementary Methods class have really reinforced that.  I don't want to teach elementary school students, but the advocacy part of the class has been very, very informative and also a good reminder as to why music is such a vital part of a child's - or anyone else's - education.  

Ok, too late for any more now.  Time for bed.