Nutcracker tonight. The Friday performance is always tough, after a full school day plus violin lessons. I got home from school 2 minutes before my first student arrived, taught lessons, and then scrounged for dinner in the bare fridge before heading over to Merrill to try to coax my fingers into playing.

The whole orchestra was tired. I've never seen G. look so wiped, actually. My fingers behaved fairly well, considering, thanks to the Magic Forehead. Sometime during the second act I caught myself wondering whether I was playing crappily and just thought I was playing OK because I was so relaxed. Maybe the Magic Forehead doesn't help my technique; maybe it only makes me feel like I'm playing better. Then I remembered how much improvement my students made this week. I can't wait to hear them next week.

I may even teach a variation of it to the tango class next week. This Wednesday I just tortured them with posture exercises. I felt sort of guilty about it since they all looked exhausted after an hour of class, but they all looked much better as they danced. We'll see what M. and I cook up for class ideas.

I'm now done with my third year of Nutcracker, post-paralysis (unless I play for Portland Ballet this year, but I doubt I will since I'd have to miss a rehearsal due to school). Each year I've had to overcome a different huge challenge. The current tally:

Year 1: didn't have enough brainpower to read music and play at the same time. Fingers couldn't remember how to do anything. I got through it by memorizing the whole thing so I wouldn't have to read the music, and I practiced every morning for 3 hours getting the fingers to do mostly the right things. I cheated in lots of places.

Year 2: can get through it, but not very gracefully. Sometimes have vibrato! Still trouble with trilling. My fingers were slow, so to play I had to try to throw them as hard and as fast as I could, and that would usually be just fast enough.

Year 3: fingers are too fast. I couldn't just throw them this year because they'd be uneven and I would be rushing. But still a little hard to control them. This year was all about dialing back the finger motion and making it more elegant and responsive. This year I had enough extra brain space to completely freak myself out and worry to death about how I was playing. Which ended up being OK, because I was forced to deal with the performance anxiety that I've had for my whole life.

The thrilling things about this year's Nutcracker:
- I learned how to completely chill myself out before a performance
- My violin students all improved as a result
- I figured out a way to think about and explain fast finger movement.
- I realized that most of the time I can trust my fingers to go in the right place, even up in 7th position.

Whee!

Update: violin student just called to thank me, saying she had to give a speech in front of 600 people and she relaxed and prepared herself using "that Zen forehead thing".

Double whee!

Afternoon class moment:

Student: "Is that a tripod?"
Ms. Green: "It's an easel."
Student: "An easel? Isn't that one of those furry little things that runs through the woods?"
Ms. Green: "ummmm...that's a 'weasel'"

OK, I'm pretty sure he was just being a wiseass, but it's hard to tell sometimes, and I know you're not supposed to laugh at students, etc., but I just couldn't help cracking up.

In Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, wasn't it the Demoness Metria who was always using the wrong words?

Ms. Green: "<...>, why aren't you doing your pseudocode?"
Student: "I can't, Ms. Green, I'm in a ditch!"
<pause>
Ms. Green: "Do you mean a 'rut'?"
Student: "Yeah, that's it, a rut."
Ms. Green: "OK—"
Student: "But a rut isn't big enough hold the amount of stuckness I have..."
Ms. Green: "So you needed a ditch."
Student: "ExACTly."

Fortunately, it only took a few minutes to get him out of his ditch...er...large rut.

Tara Tango Shoes happens to be in South Portland, and this Sunday she had a sale for local dancers. I jumped at the chance to go over, since I ordered a pair of black Celos in June and they still hadn't arrived. I ended up trying on a pair of the Celos in the metallic leather, which looked far better in person than on the Internet, and walked out of there with them instead of the ones I had originally ordered. I also ended up getting a size 8.5 instead of a 9.5 (!), so I was glad to have the chance to try them on.

By far, the most stable shoes I tried on were the Celos and the Alma. I was really surprised that the Alma felt so steady on the floor, but they were rock-solid. If I felt like spending another pile of money on a second pair of shoes, maybe I would get a pair of those. Or maybe I would just wait and have some heels made for me in Buenos Aires. :-)

Trying on fabulous shoes is fun, but so much more fun when surrounded by giggling ladies who are also trying on fabulous shoes. Many of the same gals were at the practica that evening and it seemed like we were all still feeling the giggly, festive atmosphere of the shoe sale (plus, a bunch of ladies were wearing the new shoes). Later, after going to Norm's with a bunch of the tango crowd, I was thinking how great it is to have so many fun, friendly women in tango. When I compare the tango women of Portland (having clothing swaps, parties, and working together at practices to improve) with a large number of the tango women in San Francisco, there's just no contest; the tango scene here is small but the people are fabulous.

And we have Tara Shoes. Whee!

Tonight was the third tango class in Portland that I taught with M. (note: how great that we can still teach together! With no post-relationship weirdness! Yay!) Afterwards, T. was remarking on how different my teaching style is from most tango teachers in the way that I concentrate on posture and being comfortable, and mentioned that maybe one of these days I could teach at one of the bigger workshops like Tango de los Muertos. My immediate reaction was something like "oh no, I couldn't do that, because I'm not glamorous and I don't pretend that I have all of the answers." T. said, "yeah, but that kind of thing gets old."

Does it get old? Then why does the tango community continue to support it? I can think of only a few fantastic tango teachers who are completely pedestal-free. Tango is so weird--there's the tango caste system: the top level of dancers/performers dance with each other and with a select few of the next level down. And so on down the line, until you get to the absolute beginners. Add to that the worshiping of tango teachers. Add to that teachers who need to improve their teaching mindset and skills before they can really call themselves teachers. T. said, "it was such a relief to hear you say, 'if I'm going to lose my balance there, I just put my foot down.' Like sometimes you're off balance--it's not just me." Wow. With all of that worship and self-flagellation going on, it's kind of a miracle that anyone can become a better tango dancer. Yikes.

Well, whatever, I hope I always just say no to pedestals. I hope I am always able to say, "yeah, that's a good exercise to do in the bathroom at a milonga when I'm having a bad night" without feeling self-conscious that I should ever have bad nights because I am a teacher sometimes. Yeesh. I hope I'm always able to reassure students and peers that I am always learning along with them. Because I learn as much from my students as they learn from me (maybe more). It should always be like that.

45% of students who come to PATHS have IEPs ("individual education plans"). These students are classified as "learning disabled" for a variety of physical and emotional reasons. Large teams of specialists discuss each one of these students at length in meeting after meeting. Last year I either wrote a report for or attended between 2 and 6 meetings for each student with an IEP. Given the amount of support for Special Ed required by law, you can see why a lot of parents want to have their children classified as "learning disabled": resources, resources, resources. It's truly mind-boggling.

I have several students with IEPs this year. Every one of these students has a list of "accommodations", modifications to their learning environment that I am required to provide by law. Some of them are relatively impossible ("provide a quiet place to work" with 17 students packed into a classroom full of people discussing their computer projects?) and some of them are easier ("should have the option of doing all exams orally" or "receives twice as much time on assignments"). I seriously question whether we are helping prepare these kids for the real world with some of these accommodations, though. Is my student who hates to write anything going to be able to do everything orally in the world outside of school?

During the year I have visitors in my class, students who come for a day to see whether they might enroll in my course for the next year. Today I met a young man who came to my class because he was "interested in game programming" but couldn't give me any specifics, and who currently uses the computer for "everything", (which, when I asked him to be more specific, turned out to mean playing games and chatting with friends). I have a few short tasks for visitors to do at the beginning of class to help me gauge their reading and math skills. This student made a complete mess of the elementary algebra, but could follow it OK when I drew out a more visual way of solving. Then I asked, "how would you write 5/2 as a mixed number? You know, as a whole number plus a fraction?" Student: "I don't know." I asked, "well, how do you do fractions in class?" "I use a calculator". Same thing for multiplying fractions and canceling. Nope. All done with a calculator.

More sleuthing ensued. It was interesting. He could do simple math in his head, but because he has an accommodation that says he gets to use a calculator on his math assignments he has never had to practice doing fractions out by hand. I explained to him that in my class, the way you get to the answer is just as important as the actual answer, and he looked at me blankly. I suggested that he ask his math teacher to show him how to do problems on paper, without the calculator. I wondered if being able to punch algebraic equations into his calculator in Algebra class is helping him at all. Sigh.

Progress reports come out tomorrow. They always make me squirm, because the kids who have IEPs that specify "extra time on assignments" do half (or less than half) as much as other kids. They're graded on the work they do, even if it's half as much work as everyone else did. And they get the same number of credits. Does this mean that they have to take my 2-year course for 4 years? The sending schools don't think so. They just want to get those students to graduate. Argh. Trying to shove differentiated learning into our current grading scheme just doesn't work.

I was thinking the opposite of "loose ends", but "tight ends" just makes me think of T. in my high school homeroom, who had to write "I will not hit up the tight end" 100 times for the football coach...why do I remember these things?

Tightened End #1: Maurice Cavalier is back on the road, with an inspection sticker and with an amazing body job by my dad. I am sooooo spoiled. He even painted. I tellya.

Tightened End #2: 3 blue zippers and a red zipper bought for 4 different garments that I will make during Christmas break. I was not supposed to buy any fabric, but I did. One cut. :-) I also walked out with a few yards of this half-paper, half-fabric stuff. I had mentioned to the lady who was cutting my fabric that I was going to have to make a pattern since I couldn't find any I liked, and she suggested using this instead of my usual muslin-plus-craft paper.

Tightened End #3: Marden's. (Official motto: "I should have bought it when I saw it at Marden's"). You just never know what you're going to find in there, but today I found 2 pairs of pants, 2 skirts, and a sweater. Total: $35. It would have been $43 but somehow I forgot to buy the jeans. Oh well. Now I have some great pants and a new tango skirt!

Tightened End #4: Moravian Star is lit and hanging outside. I had to take the handle off of the deck door and feed the extension cord in through the hole, and then stuff foam around it. Now that I've done this, I'm sure I'll need to use the deck door multiple times.

Tightened End #5, which was already tightened once last weekend: re-mailed Xmas package to D., after our delightful Department of Homeland Security decided not to let it leave the country because I had mailed it last weekend from a UPS store and not from the Post Office? Eh? Neither I nor the postal clerk could figure out what the problem was, but she just put another sticker on it and sent it off. If it arrives back on my porch next Saturday, I will be really annoyed.

During the tightening of End #6, a student called to see if she was playing the right notes for "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." Speakerphones are cool.

End #6: Christmas Concerto sixteenth notes learned for Christmas Eve. Figured out a new finger technique.

End #7 is still loose. I can't figure out whether I would rather learn the Korngold or the Glazunov for my next concerto. To be continued. No doubt G. will have some ideas, such as "are you nuts? You haven't played the Tchaikovsky and you want to play the Korngold?" Yes. I am nuts.

End #8 is still loose. I need to siphon the old gas out of my snowblower to see if fresh gas will make the motor stop racing and blowing puffs of smoke. Yikes.

I thought post-breakup weirdness with M. was gone, but when I think about it, I have gotten a strange vibe from him recently on at least 2 occasions. I can think of one at Norm's and one at Maine Ballroom. I just can't figure out what the feeling I'm getting is, or actually, the feeling I'm getting from him doesn't make sense, so I must be wrong. Huh. At least it's not often enough to worry about it.

Well, I wasn't burning down the house, only spending 10 hours of my Sunday in the basement with my dad cleaning out my furnace and adding some new controls to make it more efficient. My dad does all of the knuckle-banging and swearing and I hold the light and fetch tools and clean things and get water and so forth.

After 10 hours of this, my dad, (who recently went through his Oil Burner certification at SMCC), did a bunch of tests. Not running terribly efficiently. The last guy who serviced the furnace had, fortunately, left a note about what he had done...so we could see (looking at the specs in Dad's notebook) that my furnace currently has a nozzle that's too big for the amount of pressure the pump is at, meaning that I'm using about 10% more fuel than I should be using at that much pressure. Looking more carefully, we could see that the type of nozzle the last person put in is the wrong kind of nozzle altogether (solid when it should be hollow). You can bet my dad will be back soon to change the nozzle and up the pump pressure--doing so means I can use 20% less fuel.

Two words: gas boiler. :-) My oil furnace is extremely interesting, but I'll take "clean, efficient, and low-maintenance" over "interesting" any day. So when my dad said "if I could get you a good deal on a gas boiler, would you be interested?" Ayuh. I was.

Now I get to go write a mid-term. And clean my apartment. And do the 10 other things I thought I was going to get done today before the shenanigans with the furnace began. Argh. On the other hand, it was fun to hang out with my dad, and while he went to the hardware to get another kind of fitting, I drilled a hole through a basement window frame and wired up a plug so I can light up my plum tree. Merry Christmas!

Of the number of students I have with ADD, how many are just hyped up on sugar? One student comes into class every day with a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. Yesterday it was half-gone, but that was his second bottle of the day. 3 liters of Mountain Dew before 11 a.m.? Maybe this is the new alcoholism. Fabulous.

D. and I have decided that I will stay with him when I go to Buenos Aires in February. I think this is a good idea. Or it could be a Very Bad Idea. Or possibly both. Or neither. Can you tell that I'm conflicted? L. said, "um, last time he was here, didn't you kick him out?" Well, yes, because I just needed to stop sobbing and I couldn't stand to have him on a bus for 10 hours stewing over the visit, so I bought him a plane ticket instead and drove him to the airport. But anyway. I said, "we've been e-mailing only in Spanish, and I think this may be the key to this relationship."

How incredibly silly that sounds. So, trying to communicate only in a language that D. and I both suck at is somehow going to help us sort out our relationship? Only I think it actually might. Here's why.

I'm an aural learner. I love words, but more than words, I love the way different phrases sound. When I read English, I hear it in my head. When I read music, I can hear the piece as I look through it. When I write, I'm often reorganizing sentences so that they sound graceful, so that they don't all have the same rhythm, so that the rhythmic structure builds to a conclusion. So that there is a cadence, and finally a resolution. I judge people by the way they talk--not consciously, and now that I realize that I do it, I'm much more aware of it and can catch myself and try to turn that part of me off. D. talks in choppy sentences, maybe from learning English when he was 8, with a Long Island accent on top of it. My musical ear can't help but make sweeping judgments based on his sentence structure. Ooooh, I hate it that I do that!

So Spanish is very helpful. It means that I can't concentrate on rhythm of phrases because I don't have Spanish in my ear yet. I don't know all of the words I need to use. I don't know much of anything--and that means that I have to read D.'s words and try very hard to hear his sentiment through them, and that is a good exercise. Too often in the past D. and I have used the same words, and then much later realized that they meant different things to both of us. Given the number of misunderstandings we've had, it's a miracle that we're still speaking to each other.

D. is very visual. When I'm dressed up he loves it, and sometimes I do dress up. But just as often, I forget that I'm wearing dirty ripped jeans and an old shirt when I decide to run to the supermarket for something, or I walk into a milonga wearing cycling gear, or dye my hair blue, or something. This used to totally bug me--shouldn't my boyfriend think I'm just as sexy in my bike gear and in my milonga attire? Ah, but shouldn't I think D. is just as smart and funny and wonderful when he's speaking in beautiful sentences? Because he really is the same even when he's choking on his words. And I'm really the same when I'm out back digging a ditch for one of my crazy permaculture projects. I love D.'s sense of visual aesthetics, though it sometimes drives me nuts. And I know that he loves my aural sensibility as it applies to music (I've only recently related it to the spoken word). We both share a love of beautiful motion. The trick is to enjoy those things without feeling like they're value judgments on the other person, I think.

At the moment, communication is perfect: in Spanish, which negates my usual language snottiness, and via e-mail, which means that I could be typing to him while looking like an absolute train wreck (at the moment I happen to be wearing a really sexy party outfit with a pair of over-the knee purple wool socks...which I think is not too bad, considering).

The big question is, what happens in person?

(Due to my blogging rule, I had to express this all to D. first...in Spanish. I won't torture you with it).