sick day/Music Appreciation

Nothing pains me more, for real, than a sick child. I have been blessed with a healthy little guy, and know that there are other parents dealing with much larger and more severe sicknesses in their children....it's too much to think about sometimes....but here in The Buff, 'tis the cold and flu season, and there is no reason to think such germs would simply skip my son this year.

So, at 4am, I jumped out of bed because of "strange sounds" coming from "somewhere" (I was sleeping like the dead and had been up til 1am anyway....I got home from work at 10pm, sort of wired, not tired, etc.) and since then, I have watched my 9-year's body rid itself of all bothersome elements in all sorts of creative ways......and his mood is bummin' even though he gets to have a day off (today was gym....he loves gym). So, it's been 2 hours since the last lil' incident, and hopefully it will taper off and move to other locales. And, hopefully, one such trajectory is not MY body. That would make this week EXTREMELY difficult.

Last night's class was great. Seems like a good group and a few more have added. NOW, today, I have to prep a new class, "Music Appreciation," a 100-level intro to western art, "classical" music. The enrollment is 115. Most are freshman. Gulp.

I taught this course years ago in Denver, and always like it. It's a different animal than the upper-classmen Pop class. The course is a CCC (core course, something required early on in the college career that gives students "breadth" in their education). Many students who enroll have some previous musical experience in highschool or just "love music," and so on. There will be those who added it only because it was open (it's now closed, and I'm not budging the enrollment number), and I'm guessing a group of seniors whose advisor suddenly said, "You missed a CCC credit! You can't graduate this spring unless you take one." And, voila! I will meet them all tomorrow.

It's 15 weeks and 1500 years of music. I'm going to lop off much of the early Medieval stuff, or at least breeze through it. There is a lot of music for a class that meets once a week. So, for the rest of today, I'm going to get this party started.

While I LOVE LOVE LOVE exploring such a diverse body of music literature, the organization of this class is the kicker...grading, attendance (or not), administering tests, learning their names (I'm sort of a stickler about that, and I have a good memory, but 115 students once a week??? Oy.), making sure they actually enjoy the lecture (sometimes big rooms can kill any kind of charisma I may muster), and so on.

Little B just fell asleep, so I'm going to get going and try to be ready for tomorrow night. Work on the Diss has stalled a bit this week, but if I get this done today and my son goes to school tomorrow, then Thurs and Fri are Diss days.

Onward toward health and musical happines!