u/Capital-Bug-3416

just paid my $5; what are everyone's favorite patreon episodes? any that have gone down in history? any really crazy shit? etc.

When I was in elementary school (2010-2016), mechanical pencils were pretty uncommon. Almost everyone used wooden pencils; maybe by 4th and 5th grade some kids had mechanical ones. In middle school, mechanical pencils were getting more common, and by my senior year of high school (2022-2023), they were basically ubiquitous! Only like 2-3 kids in each of my classes were still using wooden pencils! In college, wooden pencils seem even rarer.

I’m wondering if this is a change that happened for all ages over time, or if it’s just what people in each of those stages tend to use. Like, in 2012, were high schoolers and college students also still using wooden pencils, and now they’ve all switched to mechanical, or do elementary students still use wooden ones and then gradually use mechanical pencils more and more as they get older?

All this to, basically, ask, elementary school teachers: are your students primarily using wooden pencils? Or have those plastic bic mechanical pencils truly replaced them as the default across the board?

I just bought a recorder! It was $2.49 from the toy section of a value village and clearly belonged to an elementary schooler (first name written on the back with a sharpie in teacher handwriting, lol). So my expectations of it weren't like, high. But I'm a third-year music major studying clarinet and I thought it could be an accessible avenue for playing more music simply for the fun of it.

Anyway, it's quite out of tune. The bottom few notes (C-F) sound super sharp, and then they turn to being flat around G. Is there anything I can do with my embouchure, air, voicing, etc. (or any embouchure advice at all, frankly!) in order to account for these pitch issues? Or is this just a consequence of the fact that it's a plastic recorder I bought for $2.49 at the toy section of a thrift shop.