Audition Week

Last week was audition week, which is a nightmare for everyone who has to audition and a nightmare for our band directors and drum majors. For the first two days we had five auditioning rooms, three with our three drum majors in them and two with our two band directors in them. The drum majors start a tape recorder in the room and then they leave the room. For either the tape recorder or a band director, you play up to twelve scales, an etude, and a sight reading piece that you have never seen before.
We had twenty-nine flutes, and twenty-six clarents that would audition in room one. We had three days to get all of us done and needless to say it did not happen. The first day we got eight flutes done, the second day, when I auditioned, we got another eight flutes done. On friday, the third day, we added to more auditioning rooms with two members of the band council running the tape recorders in those rooms. We finally finished the flutes and we got through three clarinets. We were originally suposed to have the band listings done by lunch on friday, but since we still have almost all the clarinets left and all eight tubas left to go, it didn't happen. I believe that the earliest we will see the listings will be morning afternoon, but it might be even tuesday before we get to see.
My friend Kim, a drum major in our band, has the same second hour class as me and for the last three school days she hasn't gotten to class until about halfway through, because they were holding people back to audition and the drum majors were still having to run the tapes. I think this is completely ridiculous, we should have started auditions on monday like most other years we have, and we should have started out with seven stations like we did last year and the years before. It would have run so much smoother and stretching it over five days would give us more time to relax and do a better job during the auditions.
Not only is having to audition stressful for the band directors, it's stressful for us and it needs to be way more structured, i'm sure we could think of a much better way to make the audition process run smoothly.