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!!