hump day

I get this feeling regularly on Wednesdays: I'm a crappy teacher, and my students are getting absolutely nothing from my instruction. In fact, they seem to despise me.

But I never feel this way on Tuesday, or Thursday. In fact I'm always quite pleased with myself on these days. My kids are awesome and they play well.

So it occured to me that perhaps it's my Wednesday kids that are the problem. Let's take stock, shall we?

Cool Walter is no problem. His name's Walter, for crying out loud! That's defintely cool in an uncool name kind of way. But at the high school I have The Cynical One, who never practices and swings between extreme overconfidence and total rhythmic laziness. No, I will not sing that rhythm for you. Figure it out. Then there's the Space Cadet, whose eyes bug out at me everytime I ask him to try something, and once took his horn out of the case and said "Is this my trombone? It looks...different." My beginners at my other middle school are great- except sometimes I think the Gelfling believes I have no idea what I'm doing. He shoots me odd looks sometimes. My three remaining students I've only just started teaching- love the tuba player. He practices his ass off and it shows. Giggles is a euph player who insists that I give up on him sooner rather than later, in order to save myself the mental agony. And Shaggy wants me to push him hard but then pisses and moans when I do.

And after that I get stuck in after-school parking lot traffic for at least 15 minutes.

Yeah, it's definitely Wednesday's fault.