would you have a problem with an unqualified person teaching music in your school?

[goonIcantakeit]

question to both parents and teachers.

I shall be teaching classroom music next term. I'm very excited, but want to be prepared for any ill-feeling/doubts there may be about having an unqualified person teaching. It's during the teachers' PPA time.

I have a track recorder at the school in that I run an ensemble there, so I am not an unknown quantity and it is on merit.

Clam - a school that took music seriously enough to employ someone qualified to teach it.

Goon - I'm assuming that the kids who have the misfortune to be taught by someone not qualified to teach them will lose out on a decent musical education. Which is very important to me. I'm assuming also that the qualified music teachers in your area are facing unfair unqualified and probably low-balling competition. I have many friends who are music teachers and my DD1 wants to be a music teacher. Of course I'm not going to be happy at the thought of someone who isn't qualified to do that job taking it when it could be filled by someone who is qualified. I'm concerned that your situation is representative if the Govian Gradgrind agenda to downgrade and destroy music education in schools. Fiddling around on garage band is not a substitute for proper music teaching. I'm appalled that anyone would think it was.

Yes, I get that, Herc. My point was, you don't have to hang around the Primary boards on here for long to know that most good schools (and to me that would mean one that valued music and the arts highly) are full-to-bursting with waiting lists and appeals and allsorts. It's not so easy just "to move."

How can you claim you are a specialist when you have neither teaching qualifications nor musical qualifications (or did I miss something. I saw you didn't have a diploma or licentiate)

Clam - it's quite easy where I live. To get an in year transfer, that is.

Herc, well, I did ask!

The undercutting point worries me most.

But why do you think garageband isn't appropriate to use? What better way to show the layers?

Herc, I claim only to have a track record, nothing more :)

So you are doing it on the cheap? That's outrageous.

What musical qualifications do you actually have?

Those poor kids.

I would expect someone teaching music to my children to be either a qualified school teacher or a musician, playing 1 or several instruments to a high level of qualification.

Nah it's just music.

Get them to hit a few triangles and jobs done.

( unless my school wasn't normal )

I don't think I'm doing it on the cheap. I follow the local peri market rates.

I think you are being a tad unreasonable Herc. Why should the children care what I am paid.

I am still trying not to out myself but you've mentioned the name of my instrument in your other thread.

Sorry that should be your other post, not thread.
Lol re triangles.

If the alternative was no music teacher at all, I would be ok about it I suppose.

However, at my dc's school, they have unqualified p.e. 'Teachers' and the provision is rubbish. They may be good at sport, but they have no class management skills. The turnover is high, and the good kids are getting pissed off.

I haven't mentioned the name of any instrument in this thread...?

Why won't you answer the question about music qualifications?

Indeed the kids won't care what you are being paid but you said yourself you were worried about undercutting, to me that implies that you are, in fact, undercutting proper music teachers. To be honest, that's the only reason a school would employ an unqualified person - if they were doing it in the cheap. I am vehemently opposed to this - the idea that kids should be short changed by being given unqualified 'teachers' and that music education should be downgraded to something that isn't considered either a professional domain or a specialist one.

I'm not the one who is being unreasonable because I'm not the one doing a job I'm unqualified to do, on the cheap, so that a school can dodge its obligation to provide proper musical education for its pupils. I'm not cheating any children or parents.

Yes you have
An ancient set of ABRSM grades, since you ask. (7&5)
Your turn: what's up with garageband? Have you used it and found it didn't work for your class?

Dh is unqualified & teaches a Diploma course at a vocational school.

He does have a conservatoire degree though & is regarded as a specialist in his area.

The children in dds year 7 class at school use GarageBand but dd is allowed to use Sibelius as the teacher likes to differentiate.

Which leads us on to another mystery of the ages: why do schools spend money on Sibelius when Musescore is so much more powerful a way to communicate?

Not heard of musescore.

We have Sibelius & Mainstage at home (I think Mainstage s more of a patching/performance software than composition though)

However dd & dh are now both in love with notation on the mac.

Oh. You play the violin. And got up to grade 7.

I would be furious if you were teaching any of my kids music. Even if you were teaching them violin (none of them play violin though). Diploma is the minimum level for teaching and that only for real beginners.

I'm not a teacher (I have done instrument tuition in the dim and distant past, when a student and working professionally as a musician. Not for kids though (for adults in connection with (drama) performing rather than learning IYSWIM - sort of verisimilitude teaching). I have a diploma). I love GarageBand, I use it a lot as it happens, mainly for fun but also with my kids and with some ensembles I play in. GarageBand alone does not a musical education make. Although it's a nifty bit of IT (but Logic is better, really).

Musescore is open source. With musescore, you can email the files to nonmusic reading families, they play them on screen.... It's a game-changer.
I knew it was important when a dad said "sorry, he hasn't got his music, we were just playing along with the dots on the computer". That dad thought his family didn't read music.

Pictures - we use notation too. On the desktops and on the iPads. It's marvellous. DD2 (who is in y6) has to have her iPad wrested away from her at night. We don't have Sibelius, although some of my ...co ensemble-ists?... Do.

I know this is going to sound hideously mumsnetty- but both my children had grade 5 in primary school, and many of their classmates had at least grade 3. I honestly don't think grades 5 and 7 is enough to teach music.