True, the songs may not be necessary and maybe that's why we weren't told them. But if each routine does have a goal, it seems like it would be useful to know that. Here are the songs for the ten routines as the book I have lists them. I'll put the name in parentheses after the song.
Routine One teaches you coherent steps that are hard to resist. (Coherent Steps)
Routine Two passes on the skill of cross that gives you the knack of springing and shoorting. (Cross)
Routine Three tells you how to slash and squash that you can brave the darkness. (Slash and Squash)
Routine Four enables you to block the adversary with a shooting palm. (Uphold Palm)
Routine Five instructs you to prepare for an incoming ill intent. (Uphold Fist)
Routine Six guides you to advance and grapple by artifice of crooking and sprinking. (Crook and Sprinkle)
Routine Seven teaches you the flowery elbow-bending as a means of defense. (Flowery Bending)
Routine Eight directs you to stamp and tread with body rotation and hands waving. (Stamp and Tread)
Routine Nine gives you the skill of locking and sticking with a sweeping leg of a mandarin duck. (Lock and Stick)
Routine Ten teaches you the flying kick -- the key skill of spring leg. (Flying Kick)
The book, BTW, is Ten Routine Spring Leg (Chinese Kung-Fu Series 6) by Ma Zhenbang, translated by Ji Shaoxiang. Right now I tend to remember which routine is which by something about them or how we learned them. For example, I think of 1 as having almost all arm movements and 5 as the one we never do (because after our teacher taught it to us, we rarely if ever drilled it). I think it would be more useful to try to remember them by their names, poems, songs, or something that hints at the goal of practicing each routine. That's why I was looking into how similar those goals are even if the routines themselves are different.
AFAIK, our teacher has nothing about him on the web except what our club web page had (which is currently down). But a handout we got said that his teacher was Chong-Gen Giang and there may be more about him on the web somewhere. The person who created the site at
http://www.geocities.com/yunhsinyoung/ learned from the same teacher our teacher did. His name was written as Jiang, Chang-Gen there; I had to check with one of the Chinese students in our club to make sure that they were the same person since I'm not familiar with the language and transliteration of names. That's about the best I was able to find on our particular style and lineage when I went searching for more information a couple years ago. Maybe it can be a starting point to help you find more though.