For this observation, I traveled to Central High School in Woodstock, Virginia and observed a

mixed-grade guitar/ukulele class taught by Ms. Kara Levchenko. Central High has a white population
percentage of 76.8% and an economically-disadvantaged population percentage of 37.7%

I was not very impressed with Ms. Levchenko’s class or teaching style. Over the course of an
eighty-minute class period, we learned no more than five chords and combined them into perhaps three
or four popular songs. In contrast to Ms. Hagy’s class which I observed previously and in which I had
difficulty believing the class had accomplished so much in a shorter (fifty-minute) period, I left Ms.
Levchenko’s class feeling frustrated that we (and more importantly, her students) hadn’t learned more.

This leads me to my next point. We were the in large part the focus of Ms. Levchenko’s class, as
opposed to her actual students. Granted, her “class” only consisted of three children, but of those three,
one was excluded for most of the period because he was so bored he couldn’t help but tinker on his own
personal guitar he had brought to class, one was asked to teach us what had been learned up until that
point in the semester (our being music students, this left her also bored for large portions of the class
period), and one kept to herself for most of the class. Imagining the day for the students, the class was
largely not a valuable use of time. To be fair, several of the songs we did learn were also new to them, but
the chords used in them were not new and the process of changing chords with the fingers was also not
a new concept. At the beginning of class when Ms. Levchenko mentioned she had ukuleles and guitars for
us to use I was flattered that she had thought we might like to participate in the background and see what
it is like to be a student in her class. I did not realize her plan was to have us be the students and her
students assist her in teaching. We were there to observe her teaching high school students, not college
music majors.

Class was held in the library, I assume for scheduling reasons. However, when we were playing
the songs she had prepared, she sang the songs in most of their entirety while we repeated a twelve- or
sixteen-bar chord progression for the whole time. Her singing was extremely soft to the point of almost
not being able to hear it. I understand that we were in the library and I want to give her the benefit of the
doubt that maybe she was signing softly on purpose. But it didn’t sound like that. The guitars and ukuleles
that we were playing were much louder than her, and I was struck that she seemed uncomfortable singing
with us despite her mention that she was a voice major during her time at JMU.

All in all, I learned a valuable lesson that my own students are always my first priority, but I also
felt bad for the students in her class who clearly were not being inspired in the slightest to be lifelong
musickers.