I think I'm glad I only had two kids in the group today. They were tired, couldn't focus, and struggled to figure out what times 8 equals 8. I finally gave in and granted them time for a 10 minute nap followed by 15 pushups to get the blood going again. We managed to make it through another few problems, but it just seemed like torture to be asking these kids about fractions when they were struggling so much to put two coherent thoughts together.
It didn't help that I had run out of cereal the day before so there was no food for them to nibble on while we worked. Neither child tends to eat breakfast and their abilty to think is seriously compromised when they haven't had food. We did have a discussion about "healthy" cereal when one of them volunteered to bring in cereal. Every cereal he wanted to bring in was a real-life equivilent to Frosted Sugar Bombs.
We also had a discussion about "no excuses" regarding homework. One of the two routinely doesn't do homework and so I had to give the "school is your job" lecture. I explained that when he didn't even have his name written on the paper, it was an indication he hadn't even attempted to do the homework. If you choose to do karate and other fun activities, you have to make choices that allow you to complete the homework, too. One choice I pointed out was the 10 minutes I had given them in class yesterday to start the homework when he opted to play with the unit shapes instead of doing the homework. He had forgotten to hand in his homework packet from a previous unit. In looking through it, he had done less than half of one page out of the 20 or so in the packet.
I'm sure I wasn't exactly helping the situation since I hadn't had nearly enough sleep but this being the day before their spring break, the entire school was squirrelly. It was one of those days where I was very happy not to be a full-time teacher and probably the first time this year that I've been happy to leave the kids behind. On the plus side, one of them said that this is the first time she's ever enjoyed math and that she felt like she was starting to understand it. That's always a good feeling and a huge part of what brings me back each day.
Quartet rehearsal last night was good. I'd forgotten to go over a potential new song with Nikki so I couldn't sing along very well but we ran through most of our other repertoire. I gave them a copy of the new bass solo song I'd like to add. We'll see if this one makes the cut. I'm trying very hard to find a bunch of easy but interesting songs to add to our repertoire. Nikki has something like a 3-rehearsal rule but I don't think we're ready for anything that strict. Perhaps we'll choose a "if it's not reasonably solid in 6 rehearsals, we should drop it" rule. We have both a Mother's Day and a Father's Day gig coming up so we need some non-love songs to broaden our range a bit. With so many soldiers still overseas, "Bring Him Home" seems like it might work for both. It never ceases to amaze me how many songs there are about a mother's love but ones about a father's love are virtually impossible outside of country songs. Hmmm, maybe I'll see if there's a barbershop arrangement of "A Love Without End, Amen".
I had a great lunch with Nikki the other day. Lots of great conversation about jury duty, singing, competition and the challenges of finding a mentor director. Sweet Adelines had a mentor director program where both parties filled out an extensive questionaire then SAI would match up-and-coming directors with established directors as mentors. They've cut the program due to budget cuts so the question has now become one of how does Nikki shop for a mentor director. Does the mentor need to be someone that will work with AJoy or could it just be someone that works well with Nikki? AJoy's grown and changed so much over the last few years that it's a little challenging to figure out what coaches might work for us and Nikki. Donny and Amy are a formidible team and have really helped both AJoy and Nikki but looking down the road, we'll need another coach to bring us a long. It's kind of like thinking about what to put on your internet dating profile. What kinds of things can you say that will attract the "right" person and how do you know that you are focusing on the "right" and "important" things. We don't want to spend half our coaching budget bringing in someone to have it be an unmitigated disaster but if we're going to try someone, this summer is a great time to do it.
Oh well, nothing going on this weekend so I can clear off the to-do list: taxes, bills for both home and AJoy, cleaning and repairing costume stuff for competition, buying timed cat feeders for next weekend and, most importantly, sleeping. I'm going to need a lot of energy next weekend!
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