Middle School Band Injustice

I found inspiration for a post this afternoon when I heard my little brother practicing his trumpet. He is currently in 6th grade and has the same teacher I did, yet he plays much harder songs! What is wrong here?!

When I was in 6th grade I had a "encouraging" experience. It began when I had my first middle school band concert. As you can imagine, our teacher played it up like it was such a big deal. We were all just as excited as nervous as we waited for our teacher to give us the OK to begin playing.

A few minutes later, our teacher gave the introduction for our first song "One Note Tune", which consisted of a single whole note played in unison by the whole band. We played our rather short song(if you can even call it that) and expected a thunderous round of applause by our parents and supporters. All we got was a couple of unsure looks and awkward slow claps. The audience wasn't sure whether we were warming up, resting for a couple of measures, or simply restarting the song, until our teacher said "And that was our first song!".

What an embarrassment the whole thing was, and here my brother is playing away his complex songs made of more than just whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes. Man how times have changed........but my trumpet playing goes on, despite this experience:D