Posted by Gray Bach on November 26, 2001 at 17:26:21:
In Reply to: Gross injustices posted by College Professor on November 25, 2001 at 19:48:02:
I have a doozy. I will try to be as unbiased as I can, but this still makes me mad as hell every time I think about it. The school I was going to had all the problems listed on the page. If you don't attend a certain #of recitals, you get points off your applied lesson grade, all the 1 credit classes (i.e., marching band MWF 3:30-5:30, Sat. 8:00-10:00 rehearsal for the game, and then call time + the game; all for 1 credit), and the music ed program was set up in such a way that they wanted you to get a music ed degree but, in their own words, "We expect you to play like performance majors."
I can deal with all those problems, except for the playing part, because try as I might, I just wasn't all that good.
What I can't deal with is this: The entire time I was there, the verbal abuse was rampant. Teachers calling students filthy names and saying the most filthy phrases, all because of something minor. They then told me that was to remain in the classroom and to act like it never happened after class was over and would get angry when I approached them about it, no matter how tactfully or diplomatically I did it.
There was also a problem with the rest of campus having the (correct) perception that everyone in the music building thought they were better than everyone else. I even had a teacher tell me, after class one day when I had conducted the band for conducting class, "Gray, why don't you believe in yourself? You did great out there and when I asked you how you thought you did, you said, 'Okay, I guess.' Why don't you believe in yourself?" I responded with, "Mr. _____, there is a perception on campus that the music dept. thinks that they are better than everyone else and have inflated egos and I don't want to be a part of it." He responded with, "Gray, we ARE better than everyone else, and we're a bunch of a**holes around here; that's the way we are. Deal with it." This attitude rubs off on their students, and is not limited to that one teacher, but shared ny a majority of them, (though not all). There also was a big thing with the dept. chair where I saw the true colors of the faculty. They were out in the hallways and in lessons calling teachers every cuss name in the book (1 in particular that they didn't want to be chair. She was interim and had been on the faculty before, was the problem.) They talked about other students and teachers with students. Everyone was fair game. But when a student got into it with someone else, they told the student that they were being unprofessional and that you would have to get along with your colleagues one day. When I asked the obvious (at least to me) why are they not being examples, they said, "We have the job already." The worst of all the chair situation was that there were vicious lies spread and teachers took, in some cases, a full day of classes to tell their take on the whole thing to the students. That, to me, is their problem. I wasn't paying money to talk about their problems. I was paying to get taught. Students were being used as pawns in what amounted to a political battle between teachers. Quite a few students and teachers on both sides left. To me, it's hard enough for a student to get a music ed degree without a lot of extraneous bulls**t going on that we were dragged into.
For the record, just so someone thinks that I'm not happy with anything, I am at York Technical School in Rock Hill, SC, and I am the happiest I have been in a long time, with another major. The teachers practice what they preach. My engineering class even is doing a project whereby we are fixing up poor people's houses for winter so they won't freeze. The students are respected and in turn, show respect. It's nice.
I think that the ultimate gross injustice here is that music is still struggling to be accepted and there are teachers like the ones I dealt with that are not helping the cause. (I realize that it is not like that everywhere, and I just chanced on this one.) I also have seen the "I play an instrument or sing so I'm better than everyone else" attitude at lots of other places: read prima donna.
My $.02
Gray Bach