The contemporary music curriculum in secondary classrooms has shifted from traditional heritage and the canon to a focus on popular music. Consequently, the curricula that music teachers deliver and the meaning of music education vary across schools. Within this context, this study aims to explore my personal experiences as a secondary-school classroom music teacher, focusing on how I negotiated the Victorian music curriculum to engage Year 7 and 8 students in music education in Australia. Drawing on Bullough's (1998) argument that one must confront biography to understand educational events, a bricolage of autobiographical, narrative, and life history approaches with the lenses of Critical Pedagogy and Affect Theory was adopted. Through retrospective autoethnographic writing, I immersed myself in writing personal narratives derived from my memory and artefacts such as teacher planners and exam and test templates I created for my students. Pinar's (1994) method of currere and Jackson and Mazzei's (2011;2022) notion of 'thinking with theory'—that is, to challenge traditional forms of qualitative data analysis such as themes and coding—were utilised to create and analyse/interpret my personal narratives. Narrative analysis is also utilised to illustrate how my personal narratives have emerged. This study sheds light on the presence of gender associations in music education and the interplay of teacher identity/subjectivity. These revealed insights contribute to the broader discourse surrounding curriculum design and implementation.