Isabel, Personally, I'm really attracted to the music teaching environment. I think it's much easier to build relationships with students because you teach them for 3 or 4 years instead of maybe just one semester. You get to see them develop not only as musicians but as human beings as well. In college I always felt that the music majors had a much tighter bond than other majors largely because everybody spent almost all day in the same building every day for 5 years. And even within that, the vocalists had an even tighter bond as did the orchestra players, band guys, and jazz majors. The other thing about music is that while the subject is the same, you don't teach the same thing every year. I would hate to be a math teacher. I just feel that teaching the same formulas every year would get repetitive and boring. At least as a band/choir director you can go 5 or 10 years (or more) and never play the same piece of music twice if you don't want/need to. I don't know how it compares to other subjects, but it seems that the purpose of music teachers in high schools is not to teach music but rather to win trophies. Instead of actually teaching kids about music and exposing them to a wide variety of pieces, styles, and composers, they end up trying to polish only 3 or 4 songs all year so that can do well in competitions. Some kids develop an incorrect perception that music is about "winning". The teachers teach by rote and the result is a group of mediocre musicians who can play a few pieces well but can't play anything else. That was one of the main reasons I elected not to get a music education degree. The other was that I realized that I'd be spending half the year teaching that vile musical abomination they call marching band. So I elected to get my degree in performance with idea that I would get my Masters and Doctorate and teach at the college level where I can focus on saxophone, jazz, and the most important thing is developing musical skills and not winning trophies. PS - I just realized last night that BBS poster "BetterThanI" is a fraternity brother of mine who is a choir director in Round Rock. If you can find him, you may want to ask him about his teaching environment.
