Placement week one

I have finished the first week of music placement. I am so glad that the first week is out of the way. I taught one class this week, and I was standing in the office ready to go out, thinking to myself "I really don't want to do this..."

The music department is really old, and the instruments they have are older. They have class sets of books on a shelf at the back of the room from 1960, crappy old songs and hopelessly outdated information. They are all covered in dust, which makes me ask why are they still there?

The classes have been getting gradually better, but the teacher I am with is so depressed with the department and the state of the music in the school he has almost given up on being able to teach them anything useful about something he obviously knows a lot about. Though I don't know if he seems to know a lot because he always teaches the same thing...

The thing that I am hating the most about rounds is that even though I am at the front of the class talking, it is not my class. After they class I taught on wednesday, I sat and listened to the things he had to say to me about how to run the class and I agreed to roughly half of what he said. I suppose that is a good sign becuase it shows me that I do have definate ideas about what to teach them and how to keep them listening and how to show them things about music. I think they don't care much about it because in their experience music is pretty crap, if all they have to go by is the shite on the radio. Music is exciting and dynamic and easy and difficult at the same time, and a lot more interesting than just clapping out rhythms on drums. The way he has been teaching them stuff so far bores me to tears.

I sat in on a trumpet lesson, and that bored me to tears too. They got out their instruments and the only thing they did was play scales. I wanted to teach them about breathing together to come in without having to count, and show them how your posture changes your sound, and use a piece of music to expand their vocab, and play with the piano to fill in the spaces between their dodgy notes, and play long notes, and play loud notes to see if we could annoy the other teachers in the rooms nearby so they would buy me some practice rooms. And play something bloody INTERESTING! The state of music in this school is honestly pissing me off, and I can see soooooo many things I would do immediately to make a big difference.

Such as tidy things up. There are the old books on the side of the room, someones jumper on the floor, a broken chord lying on the ground, guitars just lying against each other, tables crooked, chairs all over the place, precussion instruments spread out so that you have to step over them, etc etc etc. He's using a green bag to store all the leads in.

Part of the problem lies in the rooms that they have been allocated, or lack thereof. There are no practice rooms what so ever. No place for a band to play where stands and chairs could be set up. No where for the music to be stored so that it can be easily accessed, the instruments are stored in the library on the other side of the school. The brass teacher told me that the instruments were the same ones when he was there, and they were crappy then. A few hundred a year to get some basic yamahas for the students to play is all it would take. If you don't have decent equipment you have nothing. Music I could get by without having to buy, but if there isn't something reliable and decent sounding for the students to play for the year and be happy to pay the band fees to rent out, then no wonder there is no band program at the school and everyone can't stand to be studying music!!

I guess I do have a lot of ideas about how to run a music program. And if you don't get what you want the first time, then bug the hell out of the office until you get it. Make no excuses.

It should be an interesting second week.