My K-8 school had once-weekly specialty subjects. For grades 7 and 8, the slate included one hour each week of Art, Music, PE, Library, and Foreign Language/Computer Literacy (each for one semester).
The music teacher I remember most was pretty cool and largely well-liked. I believe we got her through some sort of sharing agreement with the city's public school district because she also helped out with the fall and spring plays/musicals at my future high school - something she introduced to us in 5th and 6th grade. Like
@ForgedBlades, we also did simple music in the lower grades with xylophones, rhythm sticks, slide whistles, triangles, tambourines, etc. and performing an occasional single-class long musical or play which involved singing or sounding out the various parts.
For my 7th grade year, junior high students had the option of taking a music class that involved a year-end performance or one that had no performance and a study of music history and theory in its place. I chose the latter. After missing a music class while sick, I returned the next week and it was a review session for an exam the following week. I did my best to take as good of notes as possible.
What I found uncharacteristic of how she had taught our music classes in the past, she gave us a test wherein few of the questions were covered by the previous week's review. Some questions appeared to have no relevance to music in general. One such question was, "Why were the middle ages called the dark ages?" After thinking to myself that we never discussed this in class, I put down, "Because there was no electricity" as my best but incorrect guess. After getting the equivalent of a D on the test, my mom wanted a meeting with her and the teacher conceded that I was a good student in all aspects of the class apart from the low exam score, so she shouldn't be too concerned because Music, like all our other single-day specialty subjects, was graded on a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory basis with an optional comment line for student-specific feedback.
Anyways, she abruptly decided not to return to our school for my 8th grade year. So, we had no music class for the first quarter of the year and most of the second with all students likely being graded "Satisfactory" for Music by default. We then had 2-3 weeks where the school interviewed different music teachers to see who they wanted to take over. Either right before or after Christmas break, we had a winner: a woman whose first name was Nova. I'm not sure what to think of the candidates that were interviewed because Nova didn't seem to know how to engage our class and capture our interest as her predecessor did. Also, she expected the junior high students to make
lummi sticks out of rolled up paper bags and duct tape despite never showing us how to make them properly. Worse, we never used them in class once we made them. Instead, our state was celebrating a milestone anniversary of statehood that year, so the focus quickly changed to preparing for an all-school concert to celebrate. Junior high students were tasked with learning a song calling itself a rap that was more like poetry set to music than an actual rap song. I felt fortunate that I missed the concert due to bronchitis that gave me laryngitis.
