The Conflicts in College Teaching

I am in the middle of my first semester teaching Music Appreciation to undergraduate underclassmen/women and I am experiencing conflicts between the curriculum, the students and the mission of the university in this process.

There are several issues with the class that I have yet to resolve. So, I will begin with the goals of the university.

Today, universities are pressured to have a high attendance, and so when they get people to come to college, they want them to stay in college. In today’s world, a college degree helps people to get into a profession, so you have a lot of people wanting to do that.

But, I am finding that there are quite a few people who simply don’t belong in a university, for different reasons and this hanging on to students that really don’t have any business being there to keep the numbers up is in my view counterproductive. It pulls down the level of everyone and is frustrating for them as well.

People should not have to go to college or university.  Why?  Because a college or university really is about more than just preparing for a “job”, it is about becoming a well rounded human being, and the bulk of society doesn’t want that for themselves. Most people just want to get their job and go to Walmart twice a week.

The result of forcing college on people is that you get a lot of students who have absolutely no interest in what you are teaching and are basically punching the clock to get credit for an elective class like Music Appreciation.

What you have is a classroom of students who are paying a lot of money to take a class they aren’t interested in and resent having to take. This makes teaching really difficult. Because it isn’t that they can’t learn the material, they have their minds closed to it from the beginning.

Next is the curriculum. How much should I expect them to learn? How much time can I expect someone who takes this class to spend studying for it?  It is totally arbitrary. What are we really teaching in this class, music history? Really? I don’t think that is important at all. But, that is the thrust of every book I have seen on Music Appreciation.

What we are teaching should be about audience building. Training people how to be audience members is done by teaching the skill of how to listen to great music.

Also, should we start in the distant past and work our way forward or start in the present where the student is now and work our way into the past.

The elements of music such as texture, form, harmony, melody and rhythm would be much easier to present if we started with music the kids already understood and showed them how to listen to it with different ears, namely with a way to identify the elements that exist in the music they already like.

The issue here for me would be that I am not familiar with the music of the current classes of college aged students. They would be teaching me the music, and I would have to take it apart for them. Maybe it would work. I don’t know.

Clearly when you have 70 to 100 or more students in your class it becomes very difficult to identify with them one on one. You are preaching to the mob, and the mob is very diversified in their abilities and preferences.

So, we are left with doing it the old fashioned way, starting from the beginning and telling a story from the past to the present, or as close to it as you can get.

My brother’s sage advice was that assume they know nothing, because they probably don’t, and for the few that do it is all the better for them.

Today’s college student is usually walking in a daze governed by the cell phone in their hand. Either listening, to music, texting with a friend or surfing the internet. They are glued to it as if by hypnosis.

Computers, cell phones, and all the modern gadgets which can call up any kind of media you wish in an instant are really taking away the individual personalities of the students, and everyone is just sort of walking around in this zombie like daze.

But, that is my perception.

My niece said she thinks that it is a way for kids not to feel lonely in a place where there are so many people they don’t know around them. Most come from a small town where they know the folks around them, they just graduated from high school where they were a big fish, and now they are faced with being lost and lonely in a crowd of thousands just like them.

The social Greek organizations are great because it gives them a sense of belonging to something. I finally joined the choirs and operas. That was my access to finding friends with common interests with me in the field of music.

So, we are faced with the perplexing problem of trying to install some richness and culture into the spirits of students who didn’t know it existed nor cared one way or the other.

Having been a performer at the professional level I am used being the one who has to study, learn, work on myself because so many around me were so much better than I was at certain areas of music, languages and acting.

Now I am playing the game at a whole different level and it is a bit frustrating for me, I’ll admit.

I don’t know what the real answer is, but I will just have to try and continue to be excited about it and hopefully that excitement will stick on some folks and help them find a doorway, a passage into the incredibly satisfying world of music.