Up in Bangor for the second installment of the required Special Ed course, I found myself in a slightly scary-looking motel room with not enough to do. I created a T shirt design for this year's "Sebago Chamber Music for Teens" camp, our first annual sponsored by the Maine Suzuki Association, while cooking some oatmeal in the cofeemaker (shhhh...I've also made a grilled cheese sandwich in a hotel coffeemaker, back in the day, but that's another story). The T shirt design went together quickly, perhaps spurred on by the free Army National Guard pencil I was using? Teachers always need free pencils. Wished I had brought my laptop, so I could have been composing violin parts to the pop songs my students have been giving me (for summer fun and as a further incentive to practice, for kids I won't see much during the summer).
The alarm clock next to the bed gained 10 minutes every hour, so I did some math and set it for an hour and 45 minutes later than I needed to wake up the next morning. Between the weirdness of that and the weirdness of the room, I didn't sleep a whole lot--not that I needed to be awake for the class. What a complete waste of time. Not that the material isn't important, but I learned so much more from reading about ADD/ADHD on my own than I did by sitting in that class. Ack.