The concentration of the focused musician

Meet Bradley. And Gareth. Bradley is the one playing the saxophone, while Gareth is trying his best to distract him. Massive thanks for the two of them for playing around at the end of rehearsal so I could actually get some photographs rather than having to make up some sort of horrible still life once I got in after rehearsal!

Today was another working day, I started at 8.30am and didn't finish until 4pm. It was a very interesting day, as ever, although I definitely found the year nines easier to deal with than some of the other WWS. It ended up with Adam and I taking a group of the year nines, and ours were very well behaved...so we were quite surprised when some people said that they had had trouble with them. I guess it might be because the two of us have quite a lot of classroom experience so are quite used to dealing with low level disruptions and stopping them before they get bigger. I'm sure that everyone will improve with classroom management, it pretty much is something that you learn on the job!

I ended up helping someone from the WBS (Warwick Business School) run their session for the children. And it worked really well for the most of it, the children were really engaged and the task was really hands on...so of course it interested them! The workshop was on 'The Marshmallow Challenge', a simple task in which each team has twenty sticks of spaghetti, one marshmallow, one yard of tape and one yard of string. The idea is to build the tallest free-standing tower that you can that still supports the weight of the marshmallow. Tellingly, the group of people that does worst at this task are Business School graduates, and those that do best are kindergarten age children. The task is all about working as a team, so the students really enjoyed doing it.

I do have to say though, it is knackering to keep that number of children on task all day...but worth it all the way!