The days really seem to be filling up this week. Today was our final group PT session, and the intent was to do a "team building" event. The instructor chose to have us play human foosball. Since we had previously split into six performing groups (MSTs), each MST became a "line" on the foosball table by gripping wrists. We lined up and started beating the snot out of each other by booting a kickball back and forth. Our poor horn quartet line really took a beating ... one took a shot to the side of her face, another a tough hit to her chest, the other guy a hit square in the back from our own team and I did my Jimmy Rollins shoe commercial impersonation (I've had too much time to watch TV lately). It was still pretty fun, even if not aerobically challening.
For the morning training we were able to march around outside since the rain sort of let up. It was kind of fun to steer our little marching groups around the ponds that had formed out on the parade field (and good practice too). We lost a day of instruction due to weather, so I'm not sure the BNCOC students are going to get the full set of instructions this year. But those of us who have been through it before are doing what we can to help them out.
The hour before lunch was another group writing session. (Feels like I'm back in high school English class.) Since our combined classes voted to scream "LEADERSHIP" when brought to attention in formation, our instructor had us each write about that word. After 10 minutes we were instructed to mill around the class and form ourselves into clusters of folks who had sort of written some of the same ideas. Then as individual groups were were to write a 5-paragraph essay on LEADERSHIP. I just think this is the instructors' sneaky way of getting course feedback out of the students. Many people don't take AAR's very seriously, but if they have an ASSIGNMENT during class, well that will work!
During lunch I worked on the other essay that is required, one where we talk about the things we learned in the function tracks (Drum Majoring for me), how we plan to use it when we return home, and how the course instruction can be improved. Again, it's a blatant attempt to extract meaningful feedback from us. Good idea, actually.
This afternoon started out with our final small-group rehearsal. The class recital has been moved up to first thing tomorrow morning, so this was our final chance to go through our routines, finalize cosutmes, edit the jokes, etc. Oh yeah, and rehearse the music.
Last part of the duty day was spent over in the gym going through the review ceremony over and over and over. And over again. We had a couple of people that rehearsed yesterday and decided they didn't want or need to go through it again today, but we still spent almost 3 hours to get through those who wanted or needed the rehearsal. Some are still struggling with the bandmaster commands and sequence of events, but hopefully they got copies of the notes that are floating around the class. I would have been happy to help anyone out tonight, but nobody showed up after hours in the classroom. Tomorrow afternoon is the scored the evaluation. I expect there will be some "cramming" going on during lunch.
After dinner I headed back to the classroom to catch up on some paperwork. They have asked for several things to be documented (again, official feedback thinly veiled as a writing assignment). Plus I needed to make progress on my essay. I had gotten some ideas down during lunch, but mostly in outline form. I had saved the file to an online server so I could access it from the computer in the classroom. After a couple of hours of work it was time to close up the building. I then made one of those "Oh, NO!" mistakes when I closed the file. I had opened it from that web server, which was not a local copy. So when I closed the file it didn't save anywhere! I tried all the tricks I could think of, but couldn't find a temporary copy stored anywhere on the computer. Well, that lost version just became a draft. I have just completed putting together a LOCAL COPY on my laptop, which is probably better than the draft. One more read-through after some sleep and it should be finalized.
Tomorrow's another big day, with the MST performances and ceremonies evaluation. Wish me luck (if anyone is reading this)!
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