Date for Entry: (Monday 4th September, 2017)
Actual Date of Online Entry: (Wednesday 22nd December, 2021)
Dear Diary,
Today dad and I planned
to go early to school around nine in the morning to look for a timetable. Driving up to the school’s compound, the sky was too dark, the yard was
filled with vehicles and the entire school had a shaken feeling with new faces
and people from all of the other art fields hustling and bustling around. This
is one of the reasons why I did not even like the new building.
As I came out of the car, I went around the music building, and
then I saw that Mr. Sharma’s and Mr. Headley's rooms were empty through the glass window.
The name tag was gone. It was so
strange. As I walked around the entire end I saw Miss Ramlal. Nowhere had the
timetable so I went and asked her if she had a copy. When she took it out from
her folder I was shocked. It did not look like anything else from before but
more complicated like a Microsoft Excel printout.
I tried taking a picture with it from my phone but that
didn’t work since the writing was beyond fine. She told me to send her an
e-mail to remind her to send me one and she will send it. I gave her back her
timetable and left the school. It was not a pleasant surprise to see it in that
condition at all. Even the rain from the previous days made the grass so messy
it was hard for me to walk in so I decided to walk as if I was walking on the
Gymnastics beam, one foot in front of the other at a very slow pace.
Returning home in Curepe, I told dad I would go e-mail Mrs. Ramlal and he told me to give her some time since she might not even send it right
away. As I got up the hill and turned on the laptop to my Yahoo e-mail account
I saw she send it and he laughed out in surprise. I opened it and began to look
for the courses. I wrote them down on a separate page and then constructed a
detailed sheet as I usually do each semester (see the top of this entire). It was a bit confusing because
there were days that the subjects were repeating. I wondered if they were
going to be splitting the class in half by groups of two or if it was the same class and that the class day was optional. If not, I would have
class every day of the week. In addition, I have to go and chose a day for an individual class with Mr. Sharma.
After a while going through the list and that
unbelievable timetable a good few times checking for any errors, it was
about minutes to one and then I saw a message on my phone from the “We are
Artist” WhatsApp group saying that we had class. This was another of the
crazy things that happened. From the timetable, they did not even have the
English for Academic Purposes course on the timetable and so I
ended up missing that entire class on the first day, which did not feel so good
and I felt bad for that.
There were two more subjects on the first day which were “History of Western Music” and “Aural Training 1”. It was fun to hear the history class and then I knew somehow that I would have to be going over work from the certificate course in the General Musicianship classes, which would include various singing exercises.
Before I went to my beautiful school again, daddy gave me
some of the copybooks he bought for me to carry. I really wanted to wrap them
up but I did not find the big black bag of brown paper I had. I
still missed when every summer I would sit down from day to night papering all
my school books during the vacation after going book shopping. I felt to
paper more after papering all of Justin’s school books.
When I entered Studio 4 for class, it was empty and the
chairs were assembled in a circular formation. There was a new student there I
knew he was not from Trinidad because the interesting new-sounding accent said
it clearly. I felt really happy to get to come back to my school again. It did not feel as if it was a new
program at all. It felt as if it was just another plain week as if the school was
going on a long time ago. I did not say these words to Anton or the new feller
but when Justin came in class he said it and I knew what he meant.
Soon Mrs. Ramlal came into the class with her bags and then
she set up her laptop on the projector machine and then we got to start. For
the first class, we did a fun exercise during the lecture which was to look into our bags or pockets to see if we had anything related to music. She gave us a scenario with a hurricane and said if there was a massive flood that covered all of Trinidad and then hundreds
of years later people discovered it and found the school with bags filled with
books and our stuff they would have to know what type of school it was based on
what we the students had in our possession. I would not have liked to think
something like that happened so I just kept my mind off of the scenario and participated
in the activity. I mentioned my Icelandic score Mrs. Neaves gave us in General Musicianship 3.
At the end of the class, she said that we were supposed to
be getting more students to make it thirty people in the class. I knew that
some of them would have been stuck in the last-minute paperwork with UWI. She also told
us that since our class begins right after history class we would get a
ten-minute time out before. That was a good thing. Soon that class was done and
we had a recess in the middle before having Mrs. Neaves' class for Aural
Training.
As I waited outside to take in the fresh air and warm-up from that really cold breeze inside I heard that some of my friends were going
into the new building. They walked on a good bit in front of me and as I got
inside they disappeared. I was so confused when I got inside there. All of the
walls looked so tall and long. Finally, I got to find a staircase that got me
to the top floor. More confusing as it was, the whole corridor was doors and no
labels were on them. I thought I was going to find Mr. Sharma up there so I
could go and get a day for individual classes.
When I didn’t find any of those boys upstairs I went back
down and at the entrance, I heard their voices coming from upstairs. I shook my
head and went back to class. It went alright today in Aural Training. We also
did an activity which was a rhythmic exercise. It was difficult a bit to write
it out when she gave us some strips of paper to collect back. This was her
diagnostic test. In addition below is the registration page for the English for Academic Purposes tutorial.
Link(s):
- Aural Training 1 - Rhythmic Exercise.
- Semester's Fee Sheet.** [File Misplaced.]
Daryl Zion M. Ali
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