By the seat of our collective pants

Have you ever stopped to consider how much different the job of a music teacher is from the job of any other? I'm not trying to say that one job is easier or harder, they are just very different.

Imagine that you were hired to teach 7th grade math. Chances are, you would find in your classroom a nice fat text book that was officially adopted by the district's or state's school board. Open the book to page one, and there is the first lesson. What do you do when you finish lesson one? Turn the page and you move on to lesson two.

Now let's take a look at the music teacher. Unless you are teaching beginning band, chances are there isn't such a curriculum for you to rely on. Yes, there are method books that are used at levels above beginner, but you certainly couldn't rely on such a book as your soul curricular resource.

I'm now off to begin my career as an elementary music teacher, and I realized, that while I had no trouble as a band director with this void of curriculum that I had to make up as I went (a band class can easily be defined by its performances) Music is a very broad subject. My state has some very vague standards that need to be met by certain benchmarks, but leaves all of the intermediate steps up to the educator. For example, the first rhythmic concept found in our standards in at grade 3 in which students are supposed to be able to read patterns of quarter notes, pairs of eighth notes, and quarter rests. It is left to the teacher to figure out when and how these concepts should be introduced so they are mastered by third grade. I am excited to start this new career, but a bit nervous that my job is so vaguely defined.

P.S. I, in no way, mean to imply that the jobs of other class room teachers are easy. Just that they are better defined than the job of the music teacher. Also, I realize that the experienced math teacher (or any other subject teacher) is not likely to just go from page to page blindly following the lesson plans in the book. After all, we are all experts at teacher and our respective subjects and can tell when supplemental instruction, beyond what is found in the book, is needed.