A weird Thursday!

I had the weirdest day on Thursday… we had a morning of training at work. It was only meant to be a half hour session, but it turned into about an hour and a half… it was all about making financial revisions of a fairly new computer system we’re using. We’ve had it since September and so far it’s caused so many problems. I didn’t initially understand the financial side of it at all, but now I seem to have got it. And everything clicked into place really quick yesterday. So I found myself getting really frustrated; I couldn’t comprehend why the others in the office didn’t get it straight away. It’s weird, in my mind as they continued to wrestle with numbers and I waited for them to get it right, I compared it to when I teach. I often find myself getting frustrated when people don’t just get it straight away. Like if a child can’t seem to get the note out or play the rhythm right, I find myself feeling impatient and wondering why they can’t just do it. I wonder what that says about me… is it my personality? Am I an impatient person? Do I need to find new ways of expressing things? Do I need new teaching ideas?

Prior to that I’d had a mother on the phone. The second she spoke, I knew who she was, despite her not having told me. She’s Chinese and has a really strong accent, which I, unfortunately, really struggle to understand. It sounded like she was asking for Heather, I asked her to repeat it maybe twice, each time it still sounded like Heather. So I asked if she meant Helen. She said no, then it sounded like she said Head, so I asked her if she wanted to speak to Graeme. At which point she burst into tears and passed the phone to her husband. He didn’t really know what to say and I could just hear her in hysterics in the background. It was all very strange and completely threw me for the rest of the day!!!!

The evening was nice, cell group was actually really cool. I seemed to be asking ‘why?’ a lot… maybe critical reflection has finally become a part of my lifestyle!! But yeah, a good night :-)

With the fairies!!

Wow, it’s amazing how off the planet kids can be sometimes…
I spend an hour on Tuesday mornings in quite a nice school. I team-teach with another colleague. We do an hour of what we call ‘SoundStart’; teaching guitar and keyboard. He has 20 kids on guitars and I have 10 on keyboards. Normally they’re a pretty ‘with it’ bunch… sometimes it takes them a while to grasp a new idea or a new song, but once they’ve got it, they perform well.
However today was a different story!! We started with a warm up, a song we’ve done many times before… but they sounded half asleep and when Cornelius and I stopped singing, you could just hear a mumble underneath!! Then we warmed our hands up by playing a ‘familiar’ tune, except that sounded like they’d never played it before!!!
So we move on with the rest of the lesson. 4 of my girls spent the whole time bobbing up and down, looking at each others’ keyboards and pressing buttons. Normally 2 of them are fairly able, but today they were all over the shop! The other 2 I’d describe as less able, but they do normally try hard. However today, one of them just insisted on playing ‘random chords’ to the rhythm of whichever piece we did! And the other was completely ‘with the fairies’. Like, completely with them… she’d be looking at a different page to the one we were on, she’d be looking across the room at a boy playing the guitar, and when we did one piece she had 1 finger on the last note at either end of the keyboard and was playing both notes randomly!! What was going on?! 1 of my boys never really seems to be quite there… he wasn’t quite there today, but that was no surprise!!!
Then I have the other extreme, I have 2 boys who are really very able, they learn the keyboard part very quickly, so often move on to learn the guitar part too, and when we play the piece as a group they alternate between playing both parts!!
So we play ‘Old MacDonald’, my 2 ‘gifted and talented’ children are playing the guitar part and my other 8, the keyboard part… when the keyboards played, not one of them was playing anything that sounded remotely like the tune!!! Their hands were everywhere, they eyes were everywhere and oh my life, it sounded horrific!!! It was as if they’ve never played it before, except they have and I know they can play it well!!!
We ended the session by singing a song we’d learnt the previous week. And we learnt a new bit to it as well. Then we split into 2 parts. When we did that, I was pretty much singing on my own, my keyboards just weren’t singing!! And I reckon about 3 guitars were singing with Cornelius!!!!
So yeah, all in all, a, errrr, great session!! Not!! I’ve never ever experienced anything quite as ‘with the fairies’ as that!!