It didn’t take long to figure out he wasn’t joking. That in itself would have been disgusting enough, but it became even more sickening when it dawned on me that he meant it. He started small – 40% of the students in this school are hopeless, worthless. Trying to reach them is a waste of time. Each time he ran his mouth in front of other teachers- and got their approval in return- he got a little bolder, eventually working his way up to wishing death on these “forty percenters” as he called them. They were beneath him, a waste of space. Most were poor. His solution was to lock the cafeteria from the outside while the students were eating breakfast and gas them, “Auschwitz style.” Most of the kids who ate breakfast at school were from low-income families and therefore worthless. In what will become a common refrain, he wasn’t shy about pinching off his opinions in front of other teachers, and in this and all other instances he got no argument in return.
This was Maestro. Maestro was, on paper at least, a music teacher. Musically, the only interesting thing about him was how bad of a performer he was. I’ve been around a bit since then and I still can’t figure out how dilettantes like him are allowed to stay in positions they aren’t qualified for, how they can pretend to teach kids how to perform without knowing how to do it themselves. This is hindsight speaking, of course. I was just a kid then, and all I heard from other teachers was how “lucky” I was that Maestro had taken an interest in me. Nevermind that everything he “taught” me about performing I had to forget later. I got some incredibly awful advice on how to practice that I had to unlearn. Nothing at all on the mental aspects of preparing for performance (just getting most of the notes right was the goal for him), nothing on how to connect with an audience (because he didn’t know how). He was out of his element and nobody cared.
Continue reading “Maestro”
