just needed to rant about my job because it’s ruined my summer. TDLR at the end because this is gonna be a super long rant.
i’m a college student and over the
summer i’ve worked as an instructor at a rock band summer camp for the past three years (excluding 2020). sounds cool right? well it was cool when i was a camper there when i was younger, but it has gone so downhill since then, especially experiencing it as an employee now. the management has changed at least three times since i first started working here. the first manager i worked for hated me so i was super happy when she was replaced, but after that the management has changed so often that i can’t even keep track of it anymore. the entire branch of this music school has fallen apart. they don’t even advertise the camps anymore, which means i sometimes go several weeks without work due to lack of enrollment.
on top of all this, our newest manager is so incompetent. he definitely lets corporate push him around and he just overall has no idea how the camps work so he is very easily manipulated. another instructor who’s been working there for at least a decade and has known me since i was little is now trying to manipulate both me and the manager. the manager hasn’t gotten to know the employees and isn’t familiar with how the camps work yet, so my coworker probably sees this as an opportunity to be a bully to the other instructors without any consequences. on a day when the manager wasn’t there, this instructor yelled at me for having the kids eat their lunch at a table in the practice room. he said they have to eat by the front desk “in case one of them chokes.” in all my years being involved in this camp, this has NEVER been the rule. we have always just had to eat anywhere in the building, but never only at the front desk where there isn’t even a table. i asked my boss about it the next day and he said “no, they don’t have to eat at the front desk, they just have to eat in the building.” so yeah my coworker MADE UP a rule because he’s on a power trip that is enabled the pushover manager. last week, the same instructor ran the morning camp and i ran the afternoon camp, and he accused me of trashing the practice room that we teach the camps in even though i didn’t leave the room a mess at all. i kept trying to tell him it wasn’t me and there must’ve been someone teaching in there after me in the evening but he wouldn’t listen and then started yelling at my students too as if they had any responsibility for it. this dude has ISSUES. does he know how sad it is that he’s in his 50s bullying a 19-year-old and her students who are literal children? and my boss is too much of a pushover to do anything about it. he’s basically letting this guy do his job and push around the other employees.
my boss is also doing a really awful job organizing the camps and he has so much trouble understanding my comfort level and boundaries as a 19-year-old with no professional teaching background. on a good week with a lot of enrollment, there’s usually one little kid camp and one older kid camp going on at the same time. i have told him countless times that i would feel more comfortable working with the older kids because they are easier for me to teach effectively. you can’t put me in charge of a bunch of little kids and expect me know how to handle them and teach them. my boss expects us to finish two to three songs with these kids. this is a one-week half-day camp, so that’s already hard enough. so imagine how difficult it would be as a young adult with no formal background in early childhood education to teach two to three songs to a bunch of young children who have never touched an instrument before. lately my boss has finally been assigning me to the older kids like i asked, but for some reason he often throws in one random younger kid in with the older kids, and the younger kids are always such troublemakers when they’re placed with the older kids. it’s all just so overwhelming for me to deal with which he doesn’t understand at all even when i explain it to him. i’ve dealt with a fair share of crappy bosses, but none of them were as oblivious and airheaded as this one.
my boss also made a new rule that has never existed before. at the camp we record the songs we’ve been working on at the end of the week, and since he’s worried about “copyright” he’s now only allowing the instructors to teach the kids songs that we have in our curriculum catalog. in addition to this never having been the rule, these recordings are just going straight to the parents, they’re not going on spotify or anything like that. also, i’m a recording industry major and i know from my entertainment intellectual property classes that there are protections for using copyrighted songs in educational settings, so he most likely wouldn’t even get in trouble. none of the former bosses ever got in trouble for letting the camp bands record songs they didn’t have the rights to. i don’t even think corporate enforces this rule. this is just my boss having a stick up his ass and being afraid of breaking imaginary rules. he even wears a SUIT to work. nobody who has ever worked here, including former managers, have ever worn anything other than jeans and a t-shirt to work. it’s a rock band summer camp at an informal music school for kids, not some fancy prestigious conservatory. that just goes to show how uptight and stuffy he is.
i am NEVER AGAIN spending my summers working at this hellhole.
TDLR: my summer job at a rock band camp sucks. my coworker is a manipulative control freak, the camps have low enrollment and aren’t structured efficiently, and my new incompetent boss is so scared of making a mistake that he creates new rules out of thin air to make himself feel better.