in the minor

Summer randomness via a couple of my students…It’s been a little over a week since graduation, a little more than two weeks since the end of school. I miss my students. I miss school…kinda.

When I say I miss school, I mean that I miss the routine that keeps me active and sane…the stability, really.

When I say I miss my students, well, I really miss them all summer. However, now that I’m going into my 3rd year of teaching, I’ve established even more of a connection to my students (being that I am the only teacher in the department and have many of them for consecutive years). There have been two students in particular who have attached themselves a little more closely to me than the others. And I have already heard from them this summer, as I anticipated.

One student, we’ll call him B, emailed me about a recent music discovery. He is OBSESSED with the Beatles and found youtube videos of “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude” which someone re-did in the minor key, instead of the major key in which they were originally sung. So he insisted that I listen to them because it was so interesting to him. He feels that in the minor key they sound more sad, which is fitting (so he actually likes the minor key versions better).

I agreed with him regarding “Hey Jude”–probably mostly because it was the less familiar to me. “Yesterday” I have heard so many times that it just doesn’t sound right to me done differently. He also said that there is a minor key version of “Let It Be”, but he thinks it’s stupid because it’s not a sad song so it seems contradictory for it to be sung in the minor (sadder, apparently) key.

as is often the case

I did not care for this story. I read it in one afternoon while on a cruise ship. The way the author wrote the story was interesting as he slowly dropped little hints and facts as the book went on. The narrator of the story reveals that he and his wife are meeting another couple for dinner one evening. As the dinner progresses, they talk about unimportant things instead of discussing a serious issue involving each of their sons. The reader finally learns what is wrong. However, I didn’t understand the result or how they planned to solve the problem. It appears to me that the author was clever in telling the story but not so good as resolving it.

I found the story didn’t measure up with the publicity, as is often the case.

Here’s the book description…

An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives — all over the course of one meal.

It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse — the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened