A fun and productive weekend filled with sunshine and constant activity slammed into an overcast start to a week that will be filled with monotonous tasks and too many scheduled events. Add in the timing of this day - near enough the end of the school year to taste summer but not near enough to completely stop being professional - and the result was the slowest moving, most dull Monday in the history of documented lunaediesophobia cases.
Summer vacation is a wonderful, awful thing. Tough to beat three months of no alarm clocks and setting my own schedule day after day after day. But educationally those three summer months are destructive to students...and to everyone, really, on a gloomy Monday in mid-May. End-of-year testing is wrapping up, field trips are starting, and days are now consistently warm......the lure of summer has already set in for students and for teachers. Non-teachers comment on how much of a battle it must be to keep students focused on school in May; the true battle lies in keeping myself focused. I did not battle valiantly today.
Even the weather couldn't figure out how to handle this day. The forecast called for warm sunshine so I hung a load of laundry outside to dry. It rained. Several times. Our primary classes did an evacuation drill first thing this morning under cloudy skies. Later in the morning I helped supervise an early recess for several classes under steamy hot sunshine. Less than an hour later all regular recesses were moved indoors due to rain. Daughter Three and I went for a walk......in sprinkling rain....with sweatshirts on due to temps that had fallen ten degrees since noon. C'mon Monday, make up your mind here!
Getting out of bed was a chore, getting ready for school was a chore, trying to pretend to want to be in school was a chore.....heck, even writing this entry has been a chore. Time has moved at the pace of a slug. Laughter has been brief and hollow. Even the birthday cookie a student shared with me tasted bland....metaphorically speaking. I think that was metaphorical. I don't really care. It was what it be.
The only thing that could make this unending Monday more Monday-i-er would be an evening event which required my attendance. Well slap me silly and call me Bongo - there's a band concert tonight! You are true evil, Monday....true evil indeed.
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Music to the rescue!
This day, this horribly bland unfocused lousy weathered slower than turtles marching through peanut butter day came to a rousing and uplifting end thanks to our high school band program. Tonight was the Pop Concert, an annual event showcasing our grades 7-12 bands playing songs that are actually fun to listen to. The theme of this year's concert was Mystery, with each band playing songs from movies or TV shows that had something to do with, you guessed it, solving mysteries. The kids were dressed in costumes of their favorite heroes or detectives, the band directors were the Ghostbusters, and three senior band members wrote a mystery story that the concert was built around.
The programs may have said "Mystery", but the real theme of the night was "fun". It's a treat to watch students have fun in a clean, safe, respectable, and enriching way. A fun ending to a not-so-fun day. A good reminder that, when given the structures to do so, kids do know how to have the right kind of fun. Some of the jokes were lame, some of the songs got messy at times, but for ninety minutes an auditorium filled with all ages had a relaxing, enjoyable time.
And really, who cares about the quality of the jokes and music when bowls of free brownies and ice cream are doled out to the audience? I've gave a big "encore" to that!!
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