It's a Wrap

As of today, there is only one more day of classes until the end of the school year. Friday will be 12th grade graduation, and the whole week after will be exams and parents conference.

We teachers don't go on break until July 6th for some reason, which but whatever. It gives us about 6 weeks off, which is about the time off you get in England, as opposed to the 2-3 months in the USA.

In fact, US students get up to 115 days off a year! That's like a THIRD of the year!! Jeeze. What can you even learn in that time?

Anyway, it feels a little bittersweet this year. Due to some last minute changes - only a handful of students learnt about my courses and could join before the deadline. The classes I've had have been great though. My favourite has been my Composition class. Just 5 kids who I had to contact personally knowing their interest in music was quite serious. So I had great kids and we just spent the year learning how to make and perform cool music.

So this made my year extremely relaxed, beyond reasonable levels, but at the same time... boring. In a typical day, I arrive at 8:20, I start teaching at 12pm, and I finish at 12:45pm. That's it.

Other days I start at 10:20am and finish at 1:40pm. That's still not much at all!

Of course being a teacher is never 'just' teaching, as people often think. A good chunk of my 'free time' is taken up by my Head of Department role, which I do for Music, Art and Sports subjects.

I've also got various performances to deal with, a band club and music production club, sports tournaments, meetings and presentations, monthly KPI's, class observations, a lot of Saturdays (half of them!) being taken up by open houses for new students & parents to have interviews, learn about the school and so on.

So my days aren't empty, but if I could scrap all of that extra junk stuff and just replace it with a ton of teaching all day, I probably would. I just want to teach. I really enjoy music and I really love teaching. Two things I love in one, and I get paid for it. Gimme more of that and less of the paperwork and online excel documents.

The good thing about all that free time is that I get a lot of time to professionally develop. A typical geography teacher hardly needs to do that. Their teaching hours might be more, but their free time consists of watching viral videos on tiktok and drinking coffee.

For me, I need to grow my piano skills significantly among many other elements constantly. I've learnt a lot of ABRSM repertoire from Grade 4 all the way to 8 for teaching purposes, and I've been building my own curriculum and worksheets etc for future plans.

In my choir class, I have to teach a choir to sing a piece of music, sure, but before I even get there, I have to research new repertoire every semester. I have to find the resources with no budget, the sheet music, audio aids, and the editable software sheet music I can make changes to match the makeup of my particular class, re-orchestrate, add instrumentation, split parts and mix them to make listenable versions students can practice with. Sometimes I just have to listen to a piece and transcribe the entire thing from scratch, setting all the lyrics too, which can take hours.

I also have no piano accompanist so I, a non-piano player, then have to learn the piano parts as well as all the piano music for warm ups and exercises. I also have to learn to sing all four parts, Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.

The Road Home

This is all before the class even begins. Every semester is completely different. There is no workbook I can just open at page one and get to page 45 by Christmas with multiple choice tests with answers on the back page.

It's a wonder how music teachers with real full-time schedules can survive so much work!

But, for sure, this has been a cushy job, so it's no wonder I've stuck to it for 5-6 years now - much to the surprise of other teachers here, who have to work their asses off doing something they hate, and get nothing but criticism from the higher-ups as they are on the front lines of statistics and parental complaints. It seems quite a miserable place for them. For me? Bliss.

The bittersweet nature of all this is that everything is set to change next year. The Chinese government is essentially destroying all private schools and bringing them into the public school system. There will be some subjects removed, and others, like 'Patriotism' class, added. Students will be studying the communist ideology, nationalist texts written by the President himself every day.

Music is bottom of the pile of priorities so my position isn't even entirely guaranteed. My choir never even got to perform outside of the Christmas Concert. We never do. I try, but there's just too many 'more important' things they all have to do from various external exams to just other events, field trips and such which take priority. Sigh.

_{The world will be seeing a LOT more pro-fascist, pro-authoritarian, race-hating Chinese kids coming over to study in the free world in the next few years. Depressing.}

Classes will strangely be reduced from 90-minute blocks to 40 minute classes similar to what you'd expect in primary school. This would be quite terrible for some of my bigger subjects. You can barely get started in that time before the class ends.

I've been looking for alternative jobs as I do not like this communist transformation at all. The crackdows are getting heavy. But ultimately, I'm in China. No matter what job I find, they will likely all have to adhere to the same national standards.

So I'm a little apprehensive about next year. I hope I get some more classes, better planned out from the start, and I really hope they're not influenced or affected by the new authoritarian requirements.

Honestly, I shouldn't even be here at this point. I'm supposed to be in England! Damn anti-immigration laws. At least, in the meantime, I can earn a really good salary doing what I love. Can hardly complain!

A bit of good news is that a drama class might be getting added. Me and a colleague are fighting for it but the higher-ups clearly lack any interest in it. We'll see!