I spent my undergraduate years at a small college known for its intimidatingly upmarket music conservatory. When I matriculated, I naively thought I could be a liberal arts major while taking advantage of the Con—as it was known—and dabbling in the percussive arts. What I soon discovered was that the percussion department in my conservatory contained some of the school’s most intense students, and faculty, and I would either have to go hard or go home.

It took me a while to realize that, however, so I spent a few months floundering as a half-assed conservatory student, using the practice rooms to play along with King Crimson albums rather than practice marimba etudes, and watching my grade in music theory trend steadily downward. It didn’t help that I was also extremely busy with French homework, the laziest parsing of Plato’s Republic ever, sleeping through even the loudest alarms, maintaining an awkward amity with an extremely good-hearted roommate with whom I’d decided I had barely anything in common, and tending to a horribly ill-advised crush on a girl who was all kinds of wrong for me. You know, typical college-freshman stuff.

I finally approached my music theory instructor about two months into the first term and said something along the lines of “I can’t do this.” Because I have a surprisingly good ear for detecting pitches, I had tested into the second-hardest level of music theory, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work necessary to keep my head above water. He charitably offered to let me withdraw from the course with a failing grade, and it was an offer I literally couldn’t refuse. Toward the end of the term he called me (this was before professors and students communicated regularly via email) to inform me that he’d carefully recalculated my grade and that my transcript would now show that I’d withdrawn from the course with a D. It was a pretty huge favor, all told.

After that, I still managed to wheedle my way into a few percussion ensembles and continued taking lessons for another year, but I embraced my much more comfortable station as an English major, which still gave me the musical experience necessary (i.e., none) to play drums in several bands, post-graduation.

Why am I thinking about my abysmal performance in music theory now? Because I spent yesterday at a faculty orientation for my new teaching gig at a private music college whose facilities, faculty, and students remind me a little bit of my brief sojourn in conservatoryland fifteen years ago. They didn’t hire me to teach music theory (duh). I will instead be teaching music journalism, far away from any actual musical instruction. But the irony of being hired to teach in a conservatory, a place I used to associate almost entirely with personal failure, is not lost on me. Our lives move in strange directions, I guess. Like sands in an hourglass, this is the circle of life, we have to go back to the island, etc.

Teaching college students how to write about music is, in many respects, my dream job. Music, teaching, and writing are the three worlds in which I’m most comfortable, and the opportunity to fuse the three in one place, at one time, is kind of a big deal. I spent my summer reading collections of music journalism and academic essays about pop music writing. The following is a partial list of the pieces I hope to assign my students. If you can think of any others I should include, please put them in the comments.

· A debate about race in indie rock between Sasha Frere-Jones and Carl Wilson.

· Pitchfork’s social history of the mp3.

· Jonathan Lethem’s memoir/essay (abstract only) about Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s No Pussyfooting.

· Nick Sylvester’s piece about Hipster Runoff’s post about Animal Collective.

· City Pages’ piece about Pitchfork.

· Glenn McDonald’s epic review of Kid A, Vespertine, and the world.

Oh, and each student gets to choose, read, and report on a book in the 33⅓ series.