It's currently the first week back teaching and, well, I have a pretty bizarre schedule this year at school. Take a look at this:
3 days of my week, I'm working a mere 45 minutes. And I use the term 'working' loosely here. Beginner guitar class? Come on. That's just fun.
The other 2 days, however, are an absolute onslaught. 4.5 hours of teaching might not seem like much, but you may notice I don't get a lunch break. I get a morning period free where I get to prepare for the upcoming classes, but that's it to the end of the day. It's also worth noting these subjects are pretty popular, my rooms filling up, making the actual teaching substantially harder.
I actually had the Band Club moved from Tuesday to Wednesday because it would just overwhelm me otherwise.
Dude, that's still easy as hell
Don't get me wrong, I'm always grateful for my light workload, and this is actually far more invigorating than the previous year where I worked even less than this. But people, including every other subject teacher, don't understand how hard this schedule actually is.
If you're a French teacher, what do you do? Well, you teach French at different levels. 1, 2 and 3.
Ok, YOU'RE FRENCH. As somebody who, once upon a time when I was young and energetic, taught English to kids from the ages of 5 all the way to 18, every day, with no qualifications in that area. It's frickin' easy. You just teach the same thing over and over at varying levels of difficulty, something that you are innately born with.
All you have to deal with is crowd control. Discipline your students, be organised, job done.
Now look at my schedule.
- How many Choir teachers can also teach Guitar?
- How many Guitar teachers can also teach AP Music Theory?
- How many AP Music theory (based in 18th century classical music) teachers can also teach production (music tech)?
How many teachers can teach all of the above?
It's like asking a French teacher to also teach students French cuisine, French history, and French... I dunno, architecture.
What people don't appreciate is that each one of my classes require a completely different set of preparations - and none of them are standardised, except the AP class. This means I can't just pick up a book, throw it on the students desk and tell them to finish up to page 32. Rinse and repeat every year.
I have no book. Choir, for example, has to have different repertoire every single year, if nothing else but to prevent repetitive concerts, but also depending on students' ability levels, gender, and interests. This year it's all-female, so I can't use the same repertoire as last year.
All these subjects have to repeatedly be built from the ground up. I didn't have music tech previously. It's a first time thing. Sometimes courses come and go, and I have to recreate every time.
It's a lot of work.
Not to mention I also happen to be the head of three departments (arts, music and sports), which comes with its own workload outside of teaching. If they put a meeting after my last class on one of those busy days I might kill someone. I also have some other side-roles such as observations of teachers, working occasional Saturdays on Open House dates, and the staff under me are also heading discipline, events, clubs and homerooms, which ultimately come back to me to some degree.
So yeah, the schedule in terms of classes looks great thanks to those three empty days, but if you were to compare my workload with I think any other teacher, It's actually quite a lot more work.
That being said, those in any of the 'core' subjects are certainly going to feel like they work more, due to their heightened expectations. The private school culture is highly competitive here, and they must have students achieving certain outcomes, winning a certain number of international competitions, and so on. Stressful.
This just isn't the case for me. My classes, we do whatever I feel is cool and fun. The outcome is irrelevant because nobody in Asia actually gives a damn about music. the burden on my shoulders is practically non-existent. Realistically, I could just sit at my desk and tell the kids to shut up while I watch movies. I suspect no issues would arise throughout the year. Students would be happy to sleep or play games or even study the 'important' subjects. Parents would likely not even hear about it, and not care if they did.
But that's not the kind of person I am. I like to enrich these kids with something more than economics exams for once in their lives.
As for those three 'free' days, well, aside from those non-teaching duties I mentioned, I'll of course be using this time to prep my classes. I might make this more work than it needs to be simply because I care about my profession and always will. I make worksheets and activities that take quite a long time to do for something that might only take up a fraction of a single class.
For example, I'm designing a kind of music appreciation section of a class twice per month, in which I pick a song I like which contains musical elements relevant to the class content, both new and review. I run through and analyse it for those elements and show why it's awesome. I dub this section 'What's so Great About This Song?' (needs some work).
In this example, I went with Ruled by Secrecy by Muse:
The lesson here, I created from scratch. I figured out the music notation, wrote it down, note-by-note, I transcribed the lyrics and analysed the harmony. I gave some historical context and discussed elements such as musical dynamics, harmony, voice leading and counterpoint.
And of course, a worksheet isn't a class. This still has to be complemented with discussion topics, activities and practice of their own - with the intent to only take up half of the class period.
French teachers, by comparison, say
'Finish page 32, you can check your score using the answer page at the back'.
Another one I'm making is for a future lesson on polyrhythms. And man, this was a pain to transcribe by ear:
When it comes to my choir class, much of the good stuff is behind paywalls and such my school won't pay for (they need a specific Chinese invoice in order to reimburse any costs), so I occasionally have to straight up just listen to an SATB (four part) choir and transcribe it myself. This can take hours, but it's worth it if I find something I think is super suitable.
Ulterior Motive
The way I see it, I'm not just making this stuff to go into the garbage the next day. I'm kind of building - and ever-improving upon - my own curriculum. Ultimately I'll be able to take it wherever I go and use it for my future career outside of this school. If I teach at another establishment or teach privately, hell, even start a substack or YouTube channel if I was ever that charismatic, all this has value. And, the more I make, the less work I have to do down the line.
Even if none of that comes to fruition, I can still hand it down to people who need it (I have already shared several stuff in online groups who need it). So, I think of it more like an investment in my future of which I also happen to genuinely enjoy the process.
Not many people can say that about their jobs!
Finally, shout-out to all the music teachers in the world who definitely work significantly harder than me. My empty days allow me to go home and not think about work after clocking out. I know of so many music teachers around the world who stay in school 4-5 hours every day just to keep up, or take the work home with them until they pass out at midnight. In countries where music actually matters, it can very easily become a teacher's entire life.