I've been working on my piano hearing materials for Teaching of Music Theory for the past half hour. I'm leaving aside the fact that the assignment seems silly--essentially, testing whether we can do what we teach, which ideally our grades should tell future employers anyway. I can at least understand that. But for someone who's taught pedagogy as long as our professor has, and who won the lifetime achievement award in music theory pedagogy in the past year, this is the most ridiculously pedagogically bad assignment I think I've had to do in my whole time here. Essentially, there are a set of things we have to do at the keyboard, and we have all these instructions in advance. But not just one set of instructions. First there's "Please be able to do the following," followed by number 1, which instructs us to choose two of the following activities, labeled a-c. Number 2 is one exercise, number 3 has component parts 1-4, etc. through number 5. Each of these exercises references pages with music on them, some of which are immediately following in the hearing packet, and some of which inexplicably are at the back of the packet after lots of irrelevant material. Okay, so far so good, I said to myself, I can handle this. Then, immediately below, are "PROCEDURES FOR THE ABOVE EXERCISES." Letter A has additional instructions for number 1, B has more for nos. 2-3, C for nos. 2-5, D for everything in general. Letter E has instructions referring to yet another set of musical examples in the packet which one is supposed to put together "to make item No. 2" (it took me about 2 minutes to realize this meant the number 2 referenced above). Then there's letter F, which further elaborates letter E.

As if this weren't complicated enough, the instructions included are like, "See page S28 No. 2. Be able to play the two-voice sightsinging exercise No. 2 as it would sound if this were written for, and played by, two clarinets in Bb. Also be able to play the bottom line, first system (only) as if it were written in tenor clef with the same accidentals. Play from the music." So wait--if the bottom line, first system (only!) had a tenor clef instead of a treble clef, but was in the same key, the pattern of intervals would be all different, not to mention bizarre: G-F-F flat (!)-E natural-E flat-D flat-C natural-D flat instead of F-E-Eb-D-Db-C-B-C. Not to mention the fact that to read all the instructions for number 2, one has to read the unnumbered text right above it, number 2 itself, and letters B, C, E and F.
Wow. Now I'm even more confused.