Hilary Sinclair: Multi-talented high school music teacher

September 23rd, 2011
By David Armstrong

It seems totally appropriate that an interview with Hilary Sinclair has to be fitted in between a late-afternoon, high-energy dance rehearsal by Motueka High School staff for the school's talent quest finals, and hometime and dinner with her family.

Being a self-confessed extrovert is a huge plus for any school music teacher, and that along with years of being part of an exciting (and for the interviewer, bewildering) range of musical and employment experiences both here and in London and Holland have primed this 50-year-old well for her latest challenge in the Motueka music scene.

Hilary was born and raised in New Plymouth. She identifies strongly with that area, knowing she has a single mountain and the west coast sea in her background.

She spent lots of time interacting with the wild, exhilarating ocean with its black sands and rocks and cliffs. Long walks and surfing gave her a respect for the sea and an ability to put things into perspective.

New Plymouth was also "musically strong" back then, she says, and especially at school. "Harry Brown was the teacher there, and choirs and orchestras and bands," she recalls.

When she was eight years old she took recorder lessons, starting a life-long love of the instrument and a special expertise in playing it which continues to grow through higher study. She also learnt clarinet and saxophone at school, but "the recorder is my instrument, apart from voice."

Hilary says she's definitely a wind player, a melody musician. Her aptitude is for soprano singing and instruments that play the melody line, rather than piano. She says it's important when working with schoolchildren to find out "what their instrument is". "For example, I find it very hard to do two different things at once with my two hands, and I'm an extrovert, so I sang and used my breath to create noise."

When she was 17 she moved to Canterbury University to do a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. Her dad was a maths teacher and, like may skilled musicians, she always had a "maths/music bent", so she decided to try being a maths teacher - the government paid a studentship on condition that you worked for 2½ years as a teacher afterwards, which seemed a good deal.

During her post-graduate year, doing teacher training at Teachers College, Hilary's involvement with music began to flourish. "There were many capable and entrepreneurial people in that class and we did all sorts of wonderfully creative things." She was in the National Youth Choir.

Teaching was fun for a while, but "I never really had a burning passion" for a career at that time, she says. "I was very opportunistic. I'd say, 'Oh what's happening over here? That looks interesting, I'll go and play in that area for a while'. I get bored easily as well - five years is about my limit with doing any career things."

So began a couple of decades under this working philosophy. After teaching for two years and a term, Hilary set off for the UK top travel and worked in London in a classical records and videos shop in Great Marlborough Street, "as a postal clerk but with wonderful music around me all the time".

She got some temporary work teaching maths in a very mixed race school where she stood out as a "blond sheila from kiwiland". "It was the days of the Brixton riots. I didn't know what hit me, because of the racism, not just white against black but amongst all the different ethnicities. Sometimes it was 90 percent discipline and 10 percent teaching." But she also had a maths club after school which some students keen to learn would go out of their way to attend.

About a year later, while taking monthly recorder lessons from a visiting Dutch teacher, she decided to chance her arm by moving to Holland to learn more intensively. As often happens with people willing to take such chances, Hilary fell on her feet, being offered a position teaching form 2 science. "I stayed one page ahead of the kids," she laughs.

Within a matter of hours she had another part-time tutoring job and a place to live. It was meant to be. "I've always found that if I'm on track then things just fall into place."

A little later she moved to Maastricht to be close to the conservatorium where she was learning recorder, and got a job at an international school. She stayed about 4½ years.

"It was a fabulous time," she says. "Particularly for the recorder and the festivals, because if you get Bach being played in Europe, it's played on replicas of the early instruments. You don't get that here. I knew that when I left, that would be something I'd be giving up.

"All these fabulous festivals and concerts, and the local events where the council was paying us to get dressed up in Medieval costumes and busk with our recorders in the street. And the carnivals! Loved those, all dressed up."

But eventually Hilary had to return to New Zealand, "because of the pollution more than anything". But also she saw the opportunity to carry on with her recorder studies at Auckland University and start a Bachelor of Music degree.

It was the early 1990s and Hilary continued privately teaching recorder, tutoring maths, and did some part-time teaching, but then decided on a change and began learning how to deliver "personal development" courses. One, a holiday course called Discovery, was for 13- to 18-year-olds. It used accelerated learning techniques and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which Hilary knew suited the way she wanted to work with teenagers. She trained as a presenter, then a trainer and finally a facilitator.

She moved to Wellington where she took on the position of office manager for the Global Youth Foundation, which ran Discovery and Accelerated Learning programmes. She also developed and began running 'Singing for Non-singers' courses in night class settings, which she still runs.

Next came a move into similar personal development courses for adults and particularly corporate clients, running workshops in accelerated learning and NLP in education as a sole trader. Then she became a speed-reading tutor, then a lifeskills tutor for mental health consumers and intellectually handicapped adults. Whew!

Still hanging in there? Her next move was to Christchurch in the late 1990s to become a management consultant, where she opened a South Island office of the consultancy firm Navigate. She did this for five years full-time.

As a member of the Sumner Theatre Group, she met Mark Wentworth when he began doing the lighting for the group. "He lit up my life, literally" Hilary says. "I'm the front of stage and he's behind the scenes, so we're a good combination.

Together they had their daughter Heather, and soon decided to move out of the big city to a town with a warmer climate and close to a city with a strong music background (like Nelson). Motueka fitted the bill perfectly.

Hilary got a half-time job with the District Health Board organising training for staff development. Mark, whose hobby was cinema, got the job as projectionist and manager at Motueka's State Cinema. (Now he also looks after the lights and sound at Memorial Hall.)

Hilary became conductor of the Richmond Choral Group and soon after began after-school choral activities in Motueka for Heather's primary school age group. Then she taught recorder and singing at Motueka South School. "So I was sort of dabbling in those areas," she says. "But it was interesting getting back involved in education at primary school. There was a need and I could fulfill that need."

She got her current job at Motueka High School in May this year. "It wasn't on my career plan at all. I was vocal itinerant here with Fay Bolt, which I enjoyed. Heather would be coming here in a few years' time and I wanted to see a really strong music department both for her and for the community." When the job came up she applied and thought, "if they could get someone better that would be just great, but someone better didn't turn up".

She says the Motueka community has got strong musical roots and a wide variety of music, and I think the school needs to respond to that with a strong music programme that nurtures and challenges people and offers opportunities.

She has found it initially hard after 25 years out of the classroom, and expects that the first 18 months will be hard, a "vertical learning curve". She is only half-time, but finds that she's working at the school most of the time.

"A lot of attitudes have changed. In a lot of ways, for the better." Do students have less respect for teachers now? "Some of that respect used to be was out of fear, because if you didn't do as you were told you got slapped or whatever, which for me isn't the sort of respect that I particularly like. I think there's more earning of respect now.

"As with parenting, it's now much more a partnership. And sometimes that can go too far the other way, but it fits with my philosophy and what I see around the school. It's more, 'we're here to help them get what they need to get', rather than 'you're here to sit down, do as you're told and learn what I'm going to teach you'. That change in philosophy needed to happen.

"If kids are willing to put in the effort, teachers are willing to put a lot of time into them."

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