Teaching Music at Woodstock

I guess I haven’t really gone into much detail about teaching music in India/Woodstock. Woodstock is definitely not what you would imagine typical India to be. I feel like I’m in India once I step off school grounds and go into the bazaar or travel someplace else. The school itself is made up of a small community of people and for the most part the buildings and supplies are nice and more westernized than Mussoorie itself. Of course there are exceptions, but overall people living on Woodstock campus have it pretty good compared to the majority of India. We have computers and internet to use at school. I have my own studio/office to teach lessons in. We have a nice staff lounge where we are served tea every after noon (and we have a rotation to bring tea snacks for morning tea within the music department – I bring something every other Thursday). BUT it is still not like anything I have ever experienced in the states (not that I have loads of experience…)
Some of the things I really enjoy about teaching here would be the students; most of them are willing to work and excited to be in band and/or taking lessons. It’s been fun getting to know my students especially when you see them outside of class. Because this is a boarding school, students are everywhere. In fact just this past weekend, our friend Jeanne had four of her students over to edit the documentary they are making. There were three girls who slept over and then they walked the boy home late at night. Megan and I went over there to crash their editing party for dinner and it was a ton of fun to be able to relate with students on a different level than in the classroom. This kind of thing has happened quite a few times in the past couple months. It’s pretty typical for teachers to have their students over for dinner or to take the OB (out of boarding). It can be really nice for the kids to get away from their dorms, since they are there so much of the time and don’t have their families close by.
Another cool thing about teaching music here is that the students get practice time scheduled into their school day. If a student is in band or orchestra, he or she has two practice blocks per week. If he or she is taking lessons (they have to be in an ensemble to take lessons) then they get 4 practice blocks per week, but one is used for a private lesson. So a student can never use the excuse of “I didn’t have time to practice!” Although there is a down side to this, the practice times generally take up a slot that the student would have had for study hall, or potentially another class – this means that they have to be somewhat committed to an instrument in order for them to choose music. Of course this is a problem wherever you go – music can get put on the back burner behind the academic courses.
One of the biggest frustrations that I have been having so far is instrument repair. There are no instrument repair shops or people that come to your school to collect instruments that need to be fixed… I have been doing my best to make things work, but some of the school owned instruments are awful. Emily has put together some “Frankenstein” clarinets (as she called them) for the beginner band kids and there are some other very questionable instruments that I can’t fix to sound great… Emily is pretty good at being creative when it comes to instrument repair – about a month ago a clarinet player’s thumb rest cracked off. I tried looking through our box of clarinet parts to find a thumb rest with matching screw holes, but none of them were even close… So Emily fashioned a “thumb rest” out of the corner of a cardboard box and taped it on! It doesn’t look pretty, but it works! And the girl hasn’t had any problems with it yet.
One other random, “interesting” thing here has to do with the monsoon and reeds. Because we are in India and in such a remote place, it takes a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time to get supplies , like reeds. I actually have a pretty good stock pile of all kinds of reeds in my office. But they were not stored in a sealed container during the monsoon season. Due to the high moisture content in the air, a lot of the “new” reed got pretty moldy… Now I found this to be disgusting and personally would have a really hard time allowing myself to play on a moldy reed. But, prior to my discovery of all these “new” moldy reeds I had had several students come to me with the moldy reed problem and they all seemed to think it was normal to just use sand paper to sand scrape away the mold. I did this a bunch of times for several different students. So once I realized that there were quite a few “new” reeds that had mold growing on them I decided that if students were ok with it, I would save these reeds by scraping off the mold! It took me a couple hours to go through all of them, but now all my different types of reeds are mold-free! That is definitely something they do NOT teach you in college/ I didn’t learn in student teaching…