Winter semester+

The plus is because the semester officially ended at the beginning of May, but I’m going to recap until the end of May, because I’m writing at the beginning of June. So besides inadvisably trekking through the arboretum, I did a lot of other stuff.

I TA’d again, and in class related news, I had 44 students (up from 32 the previous year), and graded 8 problem sets (up from 7 previously) with 5 questions each, which amounts to 352 problem sets and 1,760 problems, plus/minus undone/incomplete assignments. There was also a midterm, that I graded entirely by myself, and a final, that I graded with my advisor immediately after the students finished taking it to get the class over with. I was required to had the pleasure of holding three office hours per week, for a total of 45 hours of instruction, plus/minus time spent on Reddit. When not grading, picking up work to be graded, returning graded work, or helping students with homework that I would later grade, I fielded emails, mostly about the homework, which, as you might know, I graded.

When I wasn’t fending off students, I was doing what I’m mostly paid to be doing, as in, research. I had meetings with my advisor a couple dozen times in five months, for an average of slightly more than one meeting per week. Since I was TA’ing for him and we sometimes have phone meetings with our collaborators, that’s pretty average for my research group. Also average for us is only having group meeting about every other week, enough for everyone to present once a semester. Near the end of the semester and into summer, we had three defenses in the span of five weeks. To celebrate, we had a lab party at our advisor’s house where we had dinner and played Pandemic and saved the world. As people prepared to graduate, the lab decided to become social and start drinking together.¹ We attended a few happy hours and also a Detroit Pistons game.

¹Drinking with my lab goes like this: We arrive at the bar between 5:30 and 6 pm. Half to two-thirds of the people present order a beer. A couple people order fries. A few more people order dinner food. We talk and finish our meals/single drinks. We leave before it’s dark out and are home by 8 pm.

Band continued as usual. We had our last sixteen rehearsals and three concerts of our fortieth season. The January concert featured overtures, including Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture” (for Three Vacuum Cleaners, One Floor Polisher, and Concert Band). Yes, really. I hadn’t played anything that fabulous since PDQ Bach’s “Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion” my senior year of high school. In March, we had a joint concert with Measure for Measure, a men’s chorus founded by former UM glee club members. We played “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with them, and Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” by ourselves. If you’re a band or orchestra person, you’ll know it if you hear it. Our final concert of the season was on Mother’s Day and to celebrate we played pieces by female composers, plus Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with a UM music school professor.

The band at Hill Auditorium with Measure for Measure

(taken from Facebook)

Outside of band, I had the opportunity to play some clarinet music with people from church. For whatever reason, we seem to have an unusually high concentration of music school students, so a couple times so far, we’ve done informal concerts where the music students plus me play. In February I did a couple pieces from Lord of the Rings accompanied by harp, which was a first for me. Then in May I played the third movement from the Mozart clarinet concerto with piano accompaniment for the first time since high school. Both my accompanists were better than me, but I enjoyed myself and no one’s ears bled from my playing, so we’ll call it a success. It wasn’t all practicing and performing for me, though. Within a span of a week in April, I attended a harp recital, a piano recital, and a glee club concert. I saw the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra perform in January for Mozart’s birthday at the beginning of the semester, and after the end of the semester, I went to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play Hadyn's concerto for two horns and Brahms’s fourth symphony.

In April, I also went to see Avengers: Endgame on opening night, the first time I have ever seen a movie on opening night. In preparation, I had been watching the previous 20 movies, and I was happy with how they wrapped this phase of the MCU up. I brought musician’s earplugs that I had from pep band, which was a great decision because my brain did not hurt after three hours in the theater. I closed out this five-month stretch with a church Memorial Day picnic featuring barefoot soccer, Secret Hitler, and speed Scrabble. My feet were bruised for over a week, we spent all of Secret Hitler yelling at each other, and I can’t spell, but it was a great day. Now on to summer.