Five Days and Counting

We are almost at the finish line. If you could compare each school year with running a marathon, this time of year is like the last 385 yards to the end. Everybody is ready to be done with school. Especially the teachers.

This weekend was a little taste of summer for me. Kaia went off to New York to celebrate her sister's bachelorette party and I stayed in Eau Claire so I could march in the Memorial Day parade with my bands. I spent a lot of time with my student teacher. On Friday we went to Minneapolis to see the Minnesota Orchestra play Petrushka and the Bartok 2nd violin concerto. It was a great concert and it inspired me to buy $50 worth of cds at Chepo Records in Uptown. Good times. I also went to two graduation parties with my student teacher and we went out for dinner on Saturday night.

On Sunday I went to St. Paul to see my friend Chris. We grilled out and had a bonfire where we managed to take down a glider that he's had since college. Here is a picture of what happened when he came to Eau Claire and had a bonfire at my house a couple of weeks ago:

That's a TV stand from our college apartment. Nothing like hacking old furniture to bits in the middle of the night with an axe and then throwing them on to a roaring bonfire. The glider met a similar fate on Sunday.

Monday was the Memorial Day parade. I marched with my two bands in our Eau Claire parade in the morning. Here is a picture of "responsible Gene" with the band:

If you want to see more pictures check out the North High School Band Parent Webpage.

Afterward my student teacher and I went for a tube ride down the Chippewa River and then grilled out. I picked up Kaia at the airport in town around 5 PM yesterday, thus ending my "bachelor weekend". All in all it was fun and I didn't kill or injure myself (either by drowning, a horrible bonfire accident, or by starvation). I guess I can take care of myself after all, although it is awesome to have Kaia back home.

Now I just have to survive the next five days!

A Little Bit About Champaign-Urbana

Champaign is here. It's right next to Urbana. The University of Illinois campus straddles the border of the two cities.

It's a 2 hour drive north to Chicago and a 3 hour drive west to St. Louis. We're also relatively close to Indianapolis (2 hours) and Cincinnati (3.5 hours). And for all of you Elvis fans, we're a mere 6.5 hour drive from Memphis. So basically this town is the gateway to the nation's mid-section.

The two towns have a combined population in the neighborhood of 115,000 people. There are roughly 42,000 students that attend classes at U of I and about 11,000 of them are in graduate programs (including me and Kaia).

The towns were originally railroad towns founded in the mid-1800s. Since then they have grown into a regional hub for education and commerce, apparently earning the nickname "the silicon prairie." There are numerous historic buildings throughout the two towns and a number of parks. There are trains that run through Champaign to Chicago and New Orleans each day. In addition there is a small airport in the city and also a good bus system. Most conveniently the city is as flat as a coffee table so biking to and from school each day shouldn't be too bad.

If you really want more information about the towns check out these sites:

City of Urbana
City of Champaign

Of course, one of the main attractions is the U of I campus. I will be spending most of my time at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (here):

It's an amazing building with some really great theaters including the 2,066 seat Foellinger Great Hall. This is, incidentally, where I had my audition for the school with the U of I Chamber Orchestra. What an awesome acoustic experience! Much of the building is actually below ground, including scene shops for plays and operas, stage entrances to the theaters, offices, and rehearsal space. The giant towers in the photo are the larger performing spaces in the center. There are a total of six different venues in the Krannert Center with a lot of performances each year.

Two years of corn, conducting, and higher education

What does a cornfield have to do with Beethoven?

In the next two years of my life I will be living, with my wife Kaia, in Urbana, IL working on my masters degree in orchestral conducting. I am leaving a life of public school teaching to pursue my dreams and ambitions (insert metaphor of seeds growing into a mature crop here). It is my intent, in this blog, to share my experiences with my friends, family, and others over the next two years as I make the journey from high school band director to full time orchestral conducting student. We'll be leaving Wisconsin in August to start classes this fall.

I originally applied for grad school in December of this academic year and was accepted the day that I found out that I was laid off from my teaching job. I got an email from the music admissions department at the University of Illinois telling me that I was accepted only hours after I found out from my principal that I would not have a job next fall. After a month of wrangling my way through graduate admissions and the music department I finally received my official admission letter from the school, my student id number, and was able to apply for housing. At this point we have a place to live on campus (not a dorm) and we are ready to register for our classes. We are waiting to officially hear back about financial aid and assistantships so we are keeping our fingers crossed. Hopefully we'll figure out a way to pay for school AND eat.

In the meantime we have only two weeks left of school. I'm excited to be done with the year. I'll miss my students but I look forward to the opportunities and challenges of graduate school over the next two years. By the way, the picture above is not exactly the view from our apartment window on campus, but we're definitely a short drive from corn.