music teacher

instructor

administrative assistant

teacher

piano teacher

Bach To Rock

Upon my first day, I was immediately placed into teaching a lesson due to a no call or no show of an instructor. After I conducted the lesson session, the student was amazed and gave me an amazing performance review to my manager. The second day of training was finally my day to complete more paperwork and finalize the hiring process. After the training was complete, I had a few question to gather an understanding of why the company chooses to utilize specific softwares for its classes, specifically the Beatmaker 101 class. My manager, took these questions I had in the form that I was challenging the company’s uniform policy. I understood that Bach To Rock wants to maintain the same experience across all schools across the nation. My manager could not properly explain why the courses were structured and seemed to have no knowledge in what materials make up the class. In other words, this location is failing to keep that uniform education experience. I had to reiterate that my question were not challenge the structure in play, nor to downplay on the knowledge of my manager or the company. At the time of this discussion no evidence of frustration or negativity was present in the room, and me and my manager had concluded the training with a positive outcome. 

The next day I was contacted in that I have been terminated. My manager claimed that she “felt in her gut” that I was not onboard with Bach To Rock’s policy. I explained to her that this was not the case, in that I share the same goal as she did in providing music education, but with the methods and structure Bach To Rock has formed. This was concrete and understanding in that Bach To Rock wants to maintain a uniform experience across the nation in their schools. My manager was silent. I wanted to clarify with her that I only had two days of training, my first day excelling in my abilities to instruct one of their highly skilled student because their instructor No called no showed, my second day to prepare and learn about the company so that I may adjust to the methods of Bach To Rock, and yet my termination is solely judged in my actions of asking questions to prepare for the job. She paused and silently said yes. There was reconsideration in my case and the call ended.

Bach To Rock claims that their employees are gold to bringing the experience, however, I feel that this is not the case. Maybe my manager had taken my actions in wanting to improve as challenging her and the company. If this was the case, perhaps a conversation to understand one another and move forward could have been the right choice of action. Allow me to ask this to Bach To Rock, when given a student who asks why specific playing methods are important playing different notations, does the instructor simply turn away and abandon the student?

This review is in reflection of the over a year of time I spent at Bach to Rock Penfield. This is an excellent facility built from the love and care of the PREVIOUS owners. There are friendly, admirable teachers that have been there since the beginning who will help you succeed, and there is music all around you. As a musician, this spot can be very rewarding as you can make new friends with a deep passion for music and enjoy the progress of passionate students from all ages. As an employee, you will quickly want a different job. 

As a manager you'll be expected to clean the entire facility, manage the schedule of all teachers, lessons, and events, handle social media, report weekly numbers, build bands, diffuse customer complaints, take phone calls all day, be present at external events to prospect for new students, find external events, etc. These duties can be very rewarding as the students you work with will most definitely enrich your life. Unfortunately, you will not be properly compensated for your work, whether you're a manager or a teacher.  You can go above and beyond to make customers feel at home and welcome, but it will not be recognized or rewarded by management. In fact, you will be asked to cover for them and go beyond your job description by doing their job for them. The change in ownership was quick and without notice, just like the schedule changes I was subjected to by the current owners, and when asked for a heads up I was told no, point blank. The previous owners never informed me of the available 401k, nor did the new owners. Expect to be ignored when talking to your boss, and don't expect substantial bonuses or raises. $20 for Christmas is all you will get. 

Current management has facilitated a hostile, uninviting environment that pitted the management team against each other. As a part-time stepping stone for teachers, this is a good place to get started. If you're looking to be a manager, you will be used as a replaceable asset. This is to be expected by corporations, but as a small business that works very closely with the community, this was very surprising. 

 If you are lucky enough to be favored by management, you might be able to achieve a 15-20 hour week. However, it is inconsistent hours, with large gaps in between students, for which you are not compensated. If you have to travel, be prepared for days where you only have 1 or 2 students with half hour lessons each. 
   The curriculum is questionable at best, and most teachers admit to making up lessons to fit students, then lying about the lesson details in order to meet the corporate checklist/quota that is required  and monitored for each lesson. 
   Management has been toxic since it started, according to the few teachers who have been there longer than 6-12 months, basing schedules off of favoritism rather than skill. If you have a music degree, this will be a waste of your years of training due to the low pay and retention rate of students, and if you do not have formal training you will be poorly compensated. The turnover rate for teachers is fairly astounding for such a small school, and if you leave, the management goes out of their way to write negative reviews about those teachers to future employers. There is also an anti-competitive clause restricting your ability to teach elsewhere at the same time. It is common for teachers to work 2nd or 3rd jobs teaching elsewhere but they are sure to be quiet about it.
  The hardest part of the job is there are some amazing students who are being treated to a daycare with music themes at best and other times a time-out with teachers sometimes not even being provided instruments, string and brass especially. You will also not have management to back you up if you are dealing with unruly students/parents, you are pretty much left to fend for yourself.
  The most enjoyable part of the job is the networking with various teachers who can be active in their fields. 

When I got the Job they said I would be paid $20 an hour. What they didnt tell me is that normal lesson is 30 minutes long. So here's how the would trick employees to pay them less. Lets say you had 3 lessons for the day. Instead of stacking the lessons together, they would put one lesson every hour. SO you would actually have to stay for 3 or 4 hours and only get 3 half an hour lessons, that you only made $10 a lesson for, not $20. So you would stay for 3  hours and get 3 half an hour lessons at $10 a piece. SO that's not $20 an hour, but rather $10 an hour. $10 an hour for a music teacher that had a music degree, what a total disgrace. Because the pay is so awful, theyre arent any "real" music teachers, but rather teenagers with no degrees and no teaching experience that just want bragging rights to say they are a "music teacher." Managers are terrible, lessons plans are awful and not thought out. Oh and because of copy right laws, your not allowed to teach from you-tube or even use a real recording of a song, You have to use recordings that the "teenage music teachers" made to teach your students. Try teaching a journey song with a terrible vocal rendition to your students, Embarrassing and really dumb. Managers will lie to you about the pay scale. The school is totally dead from 9am to 3pm, no students, no work. The only times you will have students is from 4pm to 7pm, that's when school is out. Saturdays and Sundays are totally dead as well. If a student calls out, you don;t get paid either. I would say that happens 30% of the time. No cancellation fee so students just take advantage of that and call out all the time, the teachers are the ones that get punked in the end.

Working at Bach to Rock can be a dream job for the right type of individual. Those who have a passion for music and working with youth will have a very rewarding experience working here. The most successful employees are the ones who are willing to teach the most, but also willing to learn the most. 

The workplace can provide rapid advancement to those who are interested in arts administration and sales/management. Several members of the top echelon of operations are people who started out as teachers here and continued to grow with the company. 

The workplace environment can be chaotic at times (they are working with children, after all) and depending on size of the school there can be dozens of students moving to and from lessons at a time. The hardest part of the job for teachers is short breaks between lessons (unless they request a half hour unpaid block on their schedule). The hardest part of the job for administrators is dealing with angry parents that either don't remember or don't understand enrollment or scheduling policies.

Overall, the most enjoyable part of working at Bach to Rock is bringing music and creativity to people of all ages. Watching a student discover their new musical concepts and mastering technique will always be a valuable reward. 

All in all a decent entry-level teaching job for recent graduates to get their feet wet in the music teaching business. Eventually everyone leaves for greener pastures. High turnover. 
If you last long enough to get a consistent 35-40 hours, it's a good gig. 

You'll either work a ton or not at all. 
Management can micromanage sometimes to a somewhat-detrimental degree. 
In-house curriculum is lacking, and the scheduling jerks you around a little bit (paid per lesson - if you have a long commute, prepare to sit around a bucn while waiting between students, on your own dime). Expect to come in your first few weeks and have one or two lessons a day.
You'll soon learn that it's a "factory farm" for getting students into bands, aka the big cash cow. Emphasis on real learning is decreased for the management telling you "teach those kids some songs so they can be put in a band!" when the students are so new they don't even know how to play yet. It's not a bad thing per se to get that experience, and the kids have fun, but the nature of how kids are funneled into group sessions purely for profit tends to leave a bad taste in your mouth. 
Severely underpaid teachers who make 15-25 an hr whereas the lessons are booked for far more than that. 
A big part of if you enjoy this will be the culture set by your fellow teachers.
Teachers should buy in more to use the iPad system which easily allows student progress to be tracked and accessed by all (for easily subbing teachers). 


Be prepared for six hour shifts where you are expected to complete both front desk receptionist duties (answering phone, voicemails, emails, customer service, managing the schedule on the go, working with teachers) and managerial duties (event planning, calling/marketing/sales, IT, scheduling, custodial duties, field marketing). The excess amount of responsibilities will not be reflected in your compensation. You are either alone or with one other manager.

The Penfield location is currently run by a married couple, and unfortunately the January transition into their ownership was very rocky. The in-person owner will often ignore the managers and will direct you to contact the remote owner, who is hard to get in touch with. The advice the managers were given was to "keep your head down and smile" when things like hour cuts, day-of schedule changes, and reactive remarks were made. The in-person owner does not take criticism and the teachers have confided how uncomfortable they've felt under the new management.

The workplace culture (minus the owners) is great, especially if you enjoy music. Everyone is friendly and comes together for the purpose of creating and learning about music. Customers range from 3 years old to seniors! 

The hourly wage is great and the work environment is alright. Be aware that during camps the employee break room is in fact the camp member break room. You won’t really have a place to eat or comfortably hang out in between lessons. Additionally, you may or may not receive training for camps and teaching instrument types you weren’t hired for. While the staff is kind and respectful, the payment system was not regular, with the bi-monthly payments often being late, and you needing to remind the office to pay you. Most of this would be tolerable, if not for the very apparent favoritism in hours given to certain instructors. I was promised I’d be given a fair amount of hours upon my hiring to teach a specific instrument type, and although I was certainly the most skilled on my instrument with years of prior teaching experience, after a two months of working I still had little to no students on my schedule, while teachers hired after me, and with different strengths, were given much fuller schedules and students that I certainly could have taught. I can’t say for sure what bias led to this, but I made barely enough money to cover my gas cost for transportation. Keep in mind, even if you do get hours, the office will not have them put back-to back, and you will often have large gaps in between your daily hours. 

B2R has a policy of trying to never pay more than $20 an hour, and I found only 1 teacher to actually reach that level before quitting. Most of us make around $14 an hour, but our schedules will not be 8 or even 6 hour days. The most you can hope for is 4 hours a day, but since turnover for students is so high, you will find most days will only have 1 or 2 students, usually several hours a apart, requiring you to wait around at the location. They do NOT pay you to wait for your students, so if you teach for a total of 1 hour over a 4 hour period, very quickly the job becomes less than 14 an hour.
The managers seem to operate in their own world where teacher complaints are shooed aside. As long as you keep the student coming back, enroll them in extra classes and reach weekly quotas, they do not care about your teaching situation. 
This also requires teachers to act as salespeople, not teachers. If you have a degree in music, you will not use many of your lessons at this job. The curriculum was written by someone who clearly does not play the instruments they are writing for. Not that the schools have the required instruments to teach. Bowed and brass instruments are not supplied to teachers.

My time at this employer was not pleasurable at all. Aside from the customers and fabulous students I was able to educate, my main concern was management. 

During the first few years of business, they worried so much about using students as free publicity for business at public events. I had a student for 2 lessons and they were already asking me to push them to perform at an event, to which in my opinion they were not ready from a mental and emotional standpoint. I was also called a lot to fill in classes outside of my skill set to teach to students. 

I personally felt a sense of desperation, disrespect, and insensitiveness from management towards staff. 

Far as the curriculum, some of the subjects are very vague and sometimes seem like a how-to manual, that I had to make lessons on the fly for more advanced students, which is an issue when the company pushes so much to following the curriculum. 

Overall I would not recommend this company to any family, student or employee due to their culture, and lack of professionalism.  

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