The Art of Teaching Music

14. Reality

fourteen reality Reflecting on how things are and how they have been during a working lifetime brings me to crucial matters regarding the reality of music teaching from my own vantage point. Whether we are just beginning or further along the road as teachers, facing the reality of teaching is important in determining what we are to do in the future. Recently, a young teacher told me that he was unprepared for the low pay and the hard work that he found when he began teaching. For him, there was a disconnect between the theory he learned at university and the reality in “the field.” He is not alone. When new teachers begin their work in schools, it is common for more experienced colleagues to say to them, “Now, let us tell you what it is really like to teach here.” For the young, it is not always clear how such things as money, the nature of the work, time spent working, and the social status of the profession are going to matter in later life. It may be that those of us who prepare future teachers have been remiss in painting an overly attractive and even unrealistic picture of music teaching in the hope of encouraging people to teach. Despite our best intentions, we may not have been sufficiently truthful about what music teaching is really like. My point, in this chapter, is to describe the reality of music teaching directly in the frame of my own experience, and also address some of the challenges, difficulties , and frustrations that are likely to lie in our way. Since my own teaching has been mainly in Canada and the United States, I am writing particularly within a North American experience. Even though I have also taught in other countries, I don’t pretend that the Reality • 255 reality I know is necessarily shared by music teachers around the world. Even within North America, teaching situations differ significantly, and my firsthand experience of different locales is limited. Still, from what I have observed, there may be some common intersections between the reality I have known and the experiences of my colleagues. Hopefully, my comments can prompt reflection about what each of us sees as important aspects of our own realities and open a conversation about the various ways in which we understand what we do as teachers. Putting different perceived realities alongside my own enables us to address common and different experiences of music teaching and lay the conceptual groundwork for systematic and comparative studies of these perceived realities—studies that I wish were more common in our field. There may also be the comfort of finding that we are not alone, and that the challenges, difficulties, and frustrations we face are shared by others. What are the realities of music teaching? I briefly sketch several groups of issues: rewards, workloads, career paths, and institutional contexts; resources of funding, space, equipment, personnel, and time; and teaching, service, and creative activity. Focusing on the hopeful prospects and pleasant aspects of music teaching is encouraging and can give us heart as we face the future. Being frank and forthright about the things that may go wrong can help us reflect on what might be done to successfully negotiate difficult situations when they arise. And taking account of the positive and negative aspects of music teaching allows those who undertake its work to do so with eyes wide open. Rewards, Workloads, Career Paths, and Institutional Contexts It must be acknowledged that in the United States, the comparative status of music teaching is quite low and music teachers are paid rather poorly in comparison to some other professions that require comparable preparation .1 Other professions such as law, medicine, business, and engineering are much more lucrative. In the academy, music teachers are often compensated at lower levels than those in other teaching fields notwithstanding the comparable and even greater amount of time required to become a musician and teacher.2 Having taught in places where union agreements, government salary structures, and university ranks preserve some measure of 256 • The Art of Teaching Music parity as well as at others where salaries differ widely according to what the market will bear, I can report that my experience of free market forces applied to music teaching shows it to be in a comparatively lowly position. Even in the best of circumstances, where teaching is rewarded quite...