I am sick and tired of the new assistant music teacher at our school this year, after both her predecessor and the previous head of music left (one left to travel, the other to have her second kid and decision to be a stay-at-home-mum) – she may have excellent performing credentials, but that doesn’t equate to being a good teacher.
In my books (in brief), a good teacher should not only have thorough knowledge of the subject, but should also be able to fluently express, elaborate and explain such knowledge in such a way that their students are able to understand without confusion nor contradiction; and I highly emphasise the word fluent. I don’t mean to be discriminatory, but I don’t think that a teacher is fitting to teach in a school/country where the curriculum is taught in English, if he/she has a language barrier over 20-30% of the time. It is so bad that for a good half of the lesson, my hand is up in the air (waving hysterically like Hermione Granger), to interrupt her and correct her terrible, incoherent phrasing of everything, not to mention having to stop her going off on a tangent and bitching at fellow students’ questions, simply because she didn’t understand what they were asking and mistook it for something she had just (poorly) explained. I think that a teacher is beyond hope when their most pissed-off-turned-indifferent student ends up teaching – in substance, that is, not length of time spent babbling in an Asian accent at the front of the class – a hell of a lot more than they do, especially when its to the EXTREME extent of other students sighing (and once applauding) out of relief that someone who comprehends the subject at hand is finally explaining things in understandable terms.
I can count on half of one hand the total amount of things that I have learnt from this particular teacher in the past 7 months, and I am NOT impressed. After 2 years of looking forward to a more challenging working environment, prepping myself to absorb the myriad of music, music history, theory, musicianship and various other aspects of such, I have been disappointed, and even more so, frustrated, time and time again at a rate of 4+ hours per week. I can’t even begin to coherently express my frustration towards this teacher, nor will a novel cover all the factors which make her a fucking terrible teacher, but I’m sure the general routine of each class which I have outlined below will give a vague idea… rather, euphemistically, might I add.
The general routine of each hour is as follows:
1. She spends forever and a half rambling about the newly enforced demand from the principal that all junior classes must line up outside class (year 11 is not a fucking JUNIOR class).
2. When she finally lets us inside, she scrawls illegibly on the whiteboard – this may sound hypocritical, as I have a highly messy handwriting, which is illegible 90+% of the time, but hell, my notes are for me, and not for the educational purposes of others – what is (I think), supposed to be the various assignment tasks’ deadlines and assessment dates. Please note that after 2 1/2 terms of stressful torment, it has become a well established routine that, until precisely a week before the due date or testing date of something, she doesn’t clarify what the hell she is actually referring to for the first ten to fifteen minutes of each hour, and often changes her mind on the marking scheme and the format in which should would like our work to be completed in.
3. Just when you think “oh god, how long until the bell rings?” or “I feel sorry for people who have never done music theory before because they’ll fail the course thanks to her, and wonder how repetitive, useless and lethargic this particular lesson will be, she puts on a CD and instructs the class to get out pen and paper for a “quiz on which country each piece of music is from”. Not only is this completely irrelevant to anything we’re supposed to be doing, but how on earth is one supposed to guess what country a particular piece of music is composed in/the country the composer’s from, especially when most of the music she is putting on was composed in the 20th Century?!! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sure even university graduates majoring in music wouldn’t have attained 100% in that quiz, let alone year 11 students, half of whom, sadly, can not tell the difference between music from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and 20th Centuries, let alone where the main influences originated from, LET ALONE guess that, OH, this sounds European, but it was composed in America!
One would’ve thought, subsequent to barely half the class being able to diffrenciate between the above said musical periods, that creating a “quiz” on such would be much more useful?
4. Even when she’s not forcing us to do an impossible music quiz, her “teaching” is beyond retarded – we, or should I say she spent 2 terms covering Part I of New Zealand composer, Gareth Farr’s “From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs”, contradicting in her definitions of musical terms and compositional functions, when I’m certain that our old teachers could’ve taught everything much more efficiently, in say… 2 or 3 weeks?
No offense (actually, offence intended), but I think even I would’ve made a much better teacher in the sense that, I wouldn’t “teach” something ambiguously, simply because I was not familiar with it, or wasn’t sure – surely if you don’t know something, you either find out, or don’t pass the incorrect information on? And I also wouldn’t promote an “open” learning (or lack thereof) environment, and then smother all opposition of very justified and elaborated opinion.
Argh, to hell with this, and her; she was half an hour late to school this morning, which resulted in 4 of us shivering in the cold outside the music department for half an hour from 7.15am, waiting for the doors to be unlocked so we could practise our group performance assessment. I would finish that stupid rant, but I’m now left with only 5 1/2 hours of sleep, followed by a painful, 13 hours at school tomorrow.
