I’ve been waffling around for a bit trying to figure out what this blog should regularly be about. At first I’d planned to make it a collection of random thoughts, but I realized that what’s really occupying my thoughts lately is my day job. So I’m going to write about that for awhile.
I’ve been teaching music outside the school system for a while now. It all started when I was looking for (I think it was a 5th?) part-time job to pay the bills while I was in undergrad, but since I graduated it’s morphed into my almost-full-time job. There are a lot of interesting things about it. The most obvious one is that my job likely only exists to the degree that it does because of cuts to arts education in public schools. This isn’t great, as it offloads costs for arts education onto parents, thus producing inequality in who can access education in the arts. Despite this, music lessons are still a a lot more affordable than other things kids could be doing.
Probably in part because of the relative affordability of music lessons, and because I work in a suburb of Toronto, I see a pretty wide range of kids from lots of different backgrounds. Lessons are one on one, so I get to talk to all these kids on a weekly basis. I learn a lot from them, like who BlackPink are, that everyone under the age of 15’s favourite song right now is Old Town Road, and that they’re way more musically savvy than adults expect them to be.
I spend a lot of time thinking about my job and what it means to have that kind of connection to a kid. Some of my students have shared life stories and asked for advice. Sometimes, I’ve been the first person to hear them sing or the first person to see their song lyrics. And I’ve distributed no small amount of anti-bullying help, both to the bullied and the bullies.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to teach music to kids in a way that makes sense and serves their educational needs, while respecting the music itself, and the people who wrote it. Music is history, and often a conversation between the living and the dead, so it’s important to me to at least try to do that history justice.
The thing is, us contract workers in local music schools who teach music lessons to kids in after-school programs aren’t operating with any kind of institutional oversight, except for the usual supervision from a boss. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it does come with certain challenges. For example, what’s up with all the racism in the music books that we use? What can we do as individual contract workers to fix it? Are rock n’ roll and pop ever really “appropriate” for children? How do you teach music they like without lying to them about the content or glossing over important issues? What about differences in music theory? How do you teach western music theory while acknowledging that other theoretical structures exist, without making things too complicated?
I hope that this series will be interesting to parents and teachers alike, as well as people who are curious about what goes through a music teacher’s head. Stay tuned for the first full topic post next Monday ❤
Edith Wilson 