My main source of frustration in the ninth grade was related to something I was very excited about in school: Music. The choir teacher I had in the eighth grade (the one from the fire drill story) got pregnant the previous year and decided to be a stay-at-home mom for the first few years. This meant we got a new teacher to take over the choirs at both the junior and high schools. We knew the name of the new teacher before the end of the previous school year. My father had actually gotten a call from her when she was looking for an apartment to rent. She previously taught in Beaver, Oklahoma before coming to Artesia. As we discovered, she was actually rather young at the time. She was 24 years old. This was going to be her second year teaching. I will refer to her as "Ms. F."
I have to start out by saying that my frustration grew from the fact that I both admired Ms. F and despised her. I admired her because out of all the music teachers I ever had, including grade school and college, she had the most musical ability. She was able to play piano and guitar perfectly. She was able to take modern pop songs and do piano and guitar arrangements by ear. She was able to conduct, sing and had perfect pitch. She may have been a musical genius. I'm surprised that with all that talent, she didn't try to pursue a career in the music industry. I'm certain that she could have been a big success behind the scenes. However, one thing I don't think she could do was compose.
Understand that is not praise that comes lightly. I am very passionate about music and admire those who do it very well, so even though the good things I am saying about her only fit in the one seemingly small paragraph above, it should rightfully cover about 10 pages. I'm not that good of a writer when it comes to handing out acknowledgements like that. What follows is everything I despised about her and it tears me up that it's going to take so much more room than the positive stuff.
It's so hard to know where to begin. I guess I will start with the issue I liked the least: She appeared to show favoritism toward the girls in the choir. The girls frequently received high praise from her. The boys, not so much. I was not the only one to notice the discrepancy. At the end of the school year, there were only two boys who had pre-registered for high school choir the next year. I was one of them. The other one always denied being that other person.
Why did she do this? Did she think girls were precious and boys were rotten to the core? (I should mention that Loyd had Ms. F as his sixth grade music teacher that same year. He also noticed that the girls appeared to get more attention from her.) This was a question that plagued me until I saw something on "20/20" a few years later. It was a report on how female high school students don't do as well as their male counterparts. The report included footage from a teachers' seminar that showed how instructors typically treat male and female students differently, with the females usually being talked down to. It struck me: Ms. F must have gone to one of these seminars and decided that she was going to single-handedly reverse that trend. How she was going to do it when she was just teaching music classes, I don't know, but I guess she wasn't going to let a 5% total student body contact number stand in her way. (I should add that attempting to reverse that trend would have been a complete waste of time in Artesia. Every graduating class I saw in the next six years had a female valedictorian and the majority of those graduating with honors were female.)
As for this accusation, I can only cite anecdotal incidents. For starters, there were the All-State tryouts. All-State was this event that took place every year that took the best singers and musicians in high schools from across the state and brought them to Albuquerque to perform in Popejoy Hall. Students in grades nine through twelve were able to participate. When I was in the eighth grade, at least 10 ninth graders got to go to the audition. I was looking forward to my chance to take part. However, I never heard anything about it until Ms. F had called for an evening practice of our pop ensemble. When I arrived, the high school choir students were wrapping up their rehearsal for their production of "Oliver!" One of the girls from the ninth grade (I'll call her "Tad") had been selected to play the title role. I had no idea that was going on. Ms. F didn't let us know anything about auditions for that. But it didn't really matter because I still wouldn't have been picked for the part as my voice had dropped to a bass level that year.
When the "Oliver!" rehearsal finished, Tad said something to the effect that she was coming back later for the All-State rehearsal. I asked Ms. F about getting into the All-State tryouts. She said I couldn't do it. I asked why. She said that the junior high principal only allowed her to take four students that year. So she selected two girls to audition and two girls to accompany them on piano at the tryouts. I guess because none of the ten ninth graders who auditioned the year before made the cut, the principal decided to reduce the number of students who could get out of school that day. Ms. F simply selected the students she liked best and held no auditions whatsoever. In the end, the two girls she pegged as having the best chance to make it were not selected for the choir.
One year later, I auditioned for All-State and I made it. The day I got the news that I was going to be in All-State, I actually saw Ms. F. And if I hadn't been under arrest for shoplifting at the time, I would have rubbed it in her face. (That's a story for later.)
Tune in Monday. There will be more, a lot more.
No comments:
Post a Comment