Tony Ryan

My thing is Music Education

For me, the supreme reward in being a teacher is seeing OTHERS learn and succeed. This is the greatest opportunity I will ever have to achieve that.

The nature of my goal

After thirty years of teaching music at Linwood College, which serves the lowest socio-economic area of Christchurch, I have hatched an AUDACIOUS MUSICAL PLAN (AMP) to take our orchestra to perform in venues throughout Europe next April.

Despite the self-evident disadvantages in our area, we have a superb orchestra of eighty players and a jazz band that recently won almost all of the major and individual prizes at The Southern Jam competing against bands from around the country. Very few of our students own their instruments and none have private music lessons. Few had lessons at all until they began learning from Itinerant Music Tutors at Linwood College.

At last year’s Secondary Schools Orchestra Festival in the Christchurch Town Hall, Linwood boasted the largest orchestra and one of the finest. After that performance the Christchurch City Council Arts Adviser and the Sister City Committee approached us to take the orchestra as cultural ambassadors to Christchurch UK, and to Europe.

Although imaginative fundraising and personal sacrifice have been remarkable features of the students’ families’ determination to make the trip a reality, there are inevitably many for whom the financial burden is great, but I am determined to find a way to include them all. An AMP scholarship would cover all the initial deposits and make the dream a reality. The learning opportunities and personal growth that this opportunity will provide are well beyond the normal reach of these dedicated students. (See my Statement of Learning Opportunities at: http://www.linwoodcollege.school.nz/noticeboard/STATEMENT_OF_EDUCATIONAL_VALUE_LEARNING_OUTCOMES.pdf)