Please note that I did not accuse you of doing so, nor did I take issue with your presentation of the interaction with your teacher in your original post. What I do take issue with is quickness and seeming ease with which others who, possessing only the barest skeleton of the story, were willing to attribute your teacher's stance to malfeasance. So while your post—or, more precisely, some of the responses to your post—was the occasion for my screed, it was not the cause of it. I could have made that more clear, or at least have communicated that to you via PM, from the outset, and apologize to you for not doing so.ThePousane wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 5:30 pm Another thing you said was how “wouldn't like it if a third party to post a very incomplete, report of something you said or did that reflected badly on your character and competence.” The thing is, I’m not saying the teacher is bad in character or incompetent at all.
In fact, I'm impressed by the underlying composure of your articulation of what must be an incredibly frustrating and aggravating situation. Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion that none of us should automatically or reflexively assume a claim or assertion made in an internet forum (or in any other medium, for that matter, but especially in an internet forum)—no matter how eloquent—to be the gospel truth, and casually impugn the individual or institution in question solely on that basis. (Yes, we all inevitably filter claims and assertions through our own experiences and our personal and political beliefs, and we all suffer from confirmation bias, but that is not an adequate excuse to assume the worst about someone—especially someone whom we don't know—when it costs us little, if anything (save, perhaps, our confidence in the infallibility of our judgement), to grant to others the benefit of doubt we want others to grant to us.)
One last comment:
While you are not employed by the teacher in the ordinary sense of being remunerated (paid to play) for your performance, in a broad sense, you are employed by the teacher, in that you are remunerated, principally in the form of knowledge and experience (which are the primary currency of educational transactions) as well as in the form of the scholarship, to be a member of his studio. (Certainly, for income tax purposes, scholarships are classified as income, and subject to income tax (though uses of scholarship moneys, such as tuition and fees, required books and supplies, etc.), are tax exempt.) The conditions attached to receiving the scholarship, such as being a member of his studio, satisfactory academic progress, performance requirements, etc., are, for all intents and purposes, "conditions" of your (continuing) employment.Finally, to your point on ensemble playing/employment, I have yet to play the horn in an ensemble or see my teacher again (due to COVID-19) and I am not employed by the teacher, as others have said. The student-teacher relationship is only bounded by a scholarship, which I am allowed to drop at anytime, which also leads to another thought.
On possibly related, note: for budgetary reasons, a neighbor—a saxophonist with a DMA in performance, former director of marching bands (2007-2013) and adjunct faculty member at a nearby univ since 2003—and another long-serving adjunct in the department, were recently "constructively discharged" through a combination of the music dept: a) admissions committee declining to admit new students (for the second consecutive year) to their respecive studios; b) reducing both the number and monetary value of scholarships offered to their students for the '20-'21 academic year (and leaving them to break the news to their current students, both undergrad and grad); c) offering them a contract for '20-21 that amounted to a 67% reduction in their current hourly pay rate; AND informing them of all of this in an email (then acted surprised and hurt when they turned the contracts down).
That may not be directly germane to your situation, but if your teacher's studio is affiliated with an educational instution rather than a private studio, he may be under pressure from the administration to reduce the size of his studio (or there may be pressure to reduce or eliminate the music program entirely) to ease the financial burden. If that is the case, his otherwise seemingly inexplicable stance may be a clumsy way of by inducing students to decide to leave "of their own accord" in order to avoid having to have the difficult, awkward face-to-face conversation with students that they are—to use a sports analogy—"being cut" (That doesn't in any way justify or excuse it, if that is the case; but, having been in both positions (employer/teacher and employee/student) at various times and in various contexts, I can understand why someone might opt to go about it in that way.)
