Justification on why I'm not going to teach

This has been on my mind a lot as of late, unfortunately. I've decided I no longer want to try to teach music education. The problem for me is that I irrationally see it more as a failure than as a decision that I made not to pursue teaching as a career.

Many of my posts have lamented the fact that people are fairly ignorant of music in many ways. It is not up to par with other subjects, and isn't given the necessary amount of time in public schools to be of any worth. While I want to somehow be an advocate for music education, I felt that teaching would be the start of that process. I would teach for several years, figure out how things are best done in the classroom, and see what I could do to help improve that process. Further down the road, I would stop teaching and find a means to implement what I could find out about music education, and see what needs to happens to create a musically literate society.

There are several things along this line of thought that I didn't anticipate that caused problems. The first is that in my mind, it's all about the music and nothing about the people. One of my posts, or maybe it was a conversation I had with someone once, anyway, I had mentioned that I thought I would make a decent teacher because I valued the subject that I taught. Many, particularly elementary school teachers define their reason for teaching as "I love kids." It usually never has to do with the subject being taught. There has never seemed to me to be as much focus on their love of the subject they're teaching. I had figured that focus and intensity that I had of music to allow me to teach better than others could. This perhaps has actually hampered me in ways, though, as I think about it.

Take the long-term subbing job that I had started. Most classes were fairly decent. I was teaching 2 band classes and 3 general music classes. The band classes are fine, they weren't too bad. The sixth grade are still fresh from elementary school, and still are fairly enthused about trying things and learning. I did have some fun with that class. The eighth grade were okay, at least they're more mature than seventh graders. This class was absolutely awful. I won't go into too many details. But to tell how it relates to the above, things the first day started off okay, of course. The problem was that when they act up and get out of hand, and blatantly try to get away with stuff, I see it more as a personal affront, not of myself, but to music. I cared so much more about the music, that it frustrated me to see them with their disrespectful attitudes and the whole look at me attitude. This caused me to become quite antagonistic of them. This is where the part where all the people who teach because of, "I love kids" could handle the situation better than I did. To be frank, of course I don't love them, that isn't me. I'm wanting you to learn music because I feel it's important, I don't actually care about you. This line of thought isn't conducive to teaching. Their apathy towards everything in general and lack of human civility frustrated me to no end, more than most people because of my focus on wanting them to know music so much. Essentially, I care too much about music that it frustrates me, and not enough for the kids which is as equal frustrating.

One other weakness is that I never really wanted to be the one doing the teaching, I just wanted to make it so that they everyone knew about music. I saw teaching as a means of learning what to do to help create a music literate society, not as what I wanted to do. Perhaps my thinking and goals are just way too idealistic for my own good.

One other problem is that I like to take time to think things through completely and thoroughly. The classroom situation makes way of thinking impossible, I take two seconds and kids are gone. I've lost them. Many times during my student teaching, this is what caused many of the classroom management issues I had.

So would it have been possible for me to work through these weaknesses and still teach? I'm not sure, but the amount of stress on my mind that it has put on me has been much more immense than at any other time of my life.

So after much thought and much prayer, because frankly, I don't need to be trying to make any decisions without the Lord right now, I've decided to take up a career as an instrument repair technician. I'm still providing services within music, it is a much needed service, and my mind is mechanical enough that I can figure it out with ease. I also have always enjoyed most instruments and tended to care more about them than I ever did the students, so hopefully next week, I'll find out for sure about my interview to start work in this type of career. Stay tuned...