This has truly been the Summer Of Camping, between two trips to Colorado, one to even-more-southern Indiana, and finally a trip last night to Morgan-Monroe State Forest. Sara and I briefly thought about Brown County State Park (I haven't been there for a long time) or McCormick's Creek SP (haven't been there ever) but realized that on Labor Day weekend these were likely to be mobbed, while Morgan-Monroe is usually very quiet. Well, we headed up, and checked out the campsites, but they weren't that great, mostly really open with maybe a single tree between successive sites, and plenty of large men with scruffy beards and tattered clothes standing over grills with suspicious looks on their faces. So after doing the 1-mile "Dendrology Trail" (for those of you non-scientists, the map translates that as "Tree ID Trail")--Sara did really well at dendrologing, I didn't even try--we headed to the "back country area" and walked our equipment in to the first site we found. It was basically just a flat space on the ground, but it worked out great, and this morning we did the ten-mile Low Gap Trail through the back country area, past the rock shelf I've visited with Mom, Dad, Nate, and Heather, and back to our site. All in all, a beautiful trip, and the weather was spectacular, compared to the roastings we've been getting lately.


Unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks I've felt the least excited I've ever been for a semester to start. This is partially because my degree stretches out before me like a lonely road.


Well, okay, so there are a few cars heading that way with me, and a few back at home, but still, it really hit me this summer as I completed my master's degree that I have more to go than I've already done (of graduate school, that is). However, and this is worse, I wasn't really excited about any of my classes. My advanced music theory pedagogy class looks to be much like my music theory pedagogy class from the same instructor last semester, and while she knows about as much as anyone in the entire field, I am not a huge fan of the format of the class, which entails a lot of discussion of minutia and doing of assignments with multiple parts with multiple subparts ad infinitum (nice Latin there).

My history of music theory class is worse off than this, considering that it is, if anything, less advanced than the history of music theory class I took from the musicology department last semester. (Ah, but requirements are requirements.) My current instructor has admitted that, given the choice, he'd gladly take the musicology version, and our first class, on Greek music theory, was a good example of why: he didn't even mention tetrachords, Pythagoreans and Aristoxenians were classified as if there were no gray area, students who'd read no more than a 14-page introduction to "Greek music theory" were passionately saying things like, "I think a really important aspect of the Pythagorean school is...," and for no apparent reason we have to calculate ratios for all the chromatic intervals through the octave for next week, even though ratios for sevenths (and maybe even sixths) are kind of irrelevant.

But worst of all is my Bartok class, with our expensive books and disorganized classes. One of the books the instructor had put on order isn't even in print anymore, but we still have plenty of readings from it (not awful, though it kind of is awful that she had no idea until someone emailed her after the first day of classes--and it'll run up the copying bill). Then on the first day, she had us write information cards about ourselves, which were to include "one thing you know about Bela Bartók" and "one thing you want to learn about Bela Bartók." Okay, a bit silly already, but then she taught from these cards for 15 minutes, going into little enough depth on each subject that we didn't really learn anything but enough to waste a fair bit of time. And we have two group projects, culminating in... five minute presentations. I wonder if she remembers the difference between undergraduate and graduate students...

Oh well, I'm trying to get the most I can out of my materials. And teaching is going fairly well, though I still hate teaching at 8: I and my mind make it to class no problem, but that's more than can be said for most of the students. I've managed to be quite industrious already--I've even worked ahead a little--and Pro Arte is singing a beautiful Bach (redundant) mass. So, onward down that road!