Timing

I've spent the whole day pretending that I don't have a headache.  Not an easy thing to do in my job!  At some point, as a primary school music teacher, you are just going to have to let kids bang things.  Now, I have noticed this causes a great deal of excitement and  I wonder if it's a primal instinct - the need to randomly bang things?  Some kids are tappers, always making some kind of rhythmical noise and will probably go on to learn the drums but at 8 or 9 years old, at least 2/3 of a class of 30 have absolutely no sense of rhythm at all.  They are all very excited about banging things but really couldn't find their own pulse, let alone the pulse of the music.  But if you never let them hit anything how will they ever learn?

I blame Pop Factor!  or is it X-idol? I know it's nothing to do with those programmes but I just want to blame them.

I've been thinking about speed and time a lot over the last few days.  Today, I noticed that the children who were most excited about banging something played much faster than those who just found it a little bit noisy.  Some people seem to be able to fit loads of stuff into a very short space of time and others are just 'too busy' to do anything. I'm probably someone who fits quite a lot in (although I'm the first to admit that I don't do any of it very well!) and so I guess I would be the child who bangs things quite fast.

One of the things I love about the Wednesday Adult music school is that the age range of the band is so varied.  There is every age from 18 to 80.  Actually, that can't be true because that would make 62 people in the band and there definitely aren't that many.  Most, though, act quite childishly.  One day, I might grow up and be mature but I can't see it happening any time soon.  Our conductor is my friend who makes me look positively lazy.  She's great, like the Duracell bunny, and always makes us play things much faster than we are capable of.

They say comedy is all about timing.  Maybe it was the comedy that was missing from my music lessons today ?  One Christmas, my family decided to have a Christmas Carol sing-a-long and my Dad (who is much younger than his years and does everything very fast) decided to bang his tambourine on his head. It's a much treasured home video that one day we will send to You've Been Framed for £50. Now that was both comedy and timing.