Teaching Across Seven Schools

SRMC recently put out a short Ask Me Anything reel just of me on a stool answering questions about guilty-pleasure tunes, on-stage slip-ups, and the best advice I’ve had as a musician; light stuff! But it reminded me that a lot of this work happens in small, unscripted moments and questions answered honestly. Light, fun, nothing academic, but it landed at the exact moment the term is winding down across all seven schools I’m teaching in this year.

The term is ending in phases: LASALLE in two weeks, SRMC in early December, as with most international schools. When you teach across seven institutions, “end of term” isn’t one moment. It’s tapers as a slow exhale in chapters.

These last weeks have always revealed things. At SRMC, I have a student who needs real breaks to breathe, reset, take water, and try again. He keeps showing up anyway. That kind of persistence is worth learning from, even as his lecturer! The dynamic thing is that, in the same building, some of the master’s students are absolutely on fire with their research: feminist angles, identity threads, cultural questions that actually matter. To draw more vignettes, at LASALLE, one of my private drum students is still figuring out whether higher education even “makes sense”, but thankfully finds real meaning in exploring artistry and aesthetics through our main study sessions.

Indeed, the familiar patterns also emerge: students underestimating the seriousness of higher education, arriving unprepared, and assuming they can coast because “it’s music.” Honestly, I've done all I could; I’ve already provided the tutorials and written instructions. I’m not anyone’s babysitter. The ones who want this will adjust. The rest tend to drift away on their own.

Right now, I’m trying to make the most of these weeks. I always try to capture some value before everything dissolves into juries, performances, submissions, and administrative tasks. I guess, to sum up, if this term has taught me anything, it’s that progress looks different in every room. Yet, turning up, again and again, still counts for more than people think!

Dr Eugene Seow teaches across LASALLE, SRMC, NUS CFA, NTU CAC, NLCS, Brighton College Singapore, and SJII.