Mr. Adaptability

First off a little update. My sister e-mailed me asking how my audition that was so terrible went. Well, I'm happy to report that I did not make a band at all. You ask, why in the world are you happy? That means I have an extra 6 hours a week and that class on MWF are through at 2 P.M. instead of 5 P.M. I only have 15 hours this semester and should be a cake walk. I'm probably happier that I didn't make a band than I would have been if I made one.

Now onto the blogging. This name was given to me last semester in my Education class. The class was teaching exceptional learners in the classroom environment. We were discussing ESL(English Second Language) students and the whole culture aspect. So they divided us into groups to do a little activity. The gave us a deck of cards and very vague rules of a card game. After discussion among the individual groups of how the game will be played, we played our games. Once through, the winner and loser would go to a different table. Now once playing, no talking or communicating in any way were allowed, which meant you had to figure out the rules on your own at a different table. After we finished playing and discussed about students expressed their frustration and confusion at how difficult it was to figure out what was going on. We had two exceptions to this. One guy decided to take advantage of not knowing the rules and allowed himself to stay ignorant and cheat by playing ignorant, and myself, who observed exactly how the new rules came into play, and never had a problem adapting to the new situations. If fact I quite enjoyed it. I made this known to the class and was from then on dubbed Mr. Adaptability.

I love new situations, even bad new situations, or at least most of them. My first year of college, I got my bike locked up by the police for parking it illegally. I was quite surprised to find that a parking ticket for locking my bike up to a bench instead of a bike rack was $15 more than a car parking ticket. So I had a $25 dollar ticket, classes to go to, a bike to break loose, and no idea what I'm doing. Most people would find this very frustrating. To be quite honest with you, I enjoyed it quite a bit, it was new and a departure from the norm.

Now my recent example. In woodwind methods I'm learning flute right now. Next half semester will be bassoon. Flute is probably the most unique embouchure of them all. For brass players especially. So today we're working on making the proper sound using just the head joint. It takes me about 30 seconds to produce a sound. Now granted that's just the sound, not the correct embouchure. So the teacher goes around and checks everything, see what we're doing right or wrong. I'm one of the first she works with, and it takes her a minute to explain it before I do it right. The rest of the brass took quite a while. Two took the rest of the class and still couldn't produce the proper sound. I've never played a flute before, yet I was able to pick it up very quickly. For having the muscle memory of a tuba player for more than ten years I could still adapt them to do what needed to be done.

Yeah for being Mr. Adaptability.