Today, I began my thirty-fourth year of teaching, starting our summer school credit recovery program. (Which is nearly identical to what I do at the alternative school throughout the rest of the school year, which is why I've been doing summer school the last several years.) When I started teaching, in 1984, I did so because my mother was dying of cancer, and she needed the help teaching her band classes. I discovered that I enjoyed teaching, that I was good at it (considering I was just starting), and that it felt like I was doing something worthwhile for a job.
So I made it my career. Twenty-nine years of that was being a music teacher - mostly band with some choir, classroom music, orchestra, electronic music, guitar, and math thrown in. In the early years, when rules were more lax and I taught at a small school that needed subjects covered, I also taught a little bit of art appreciation, p.e., drama, and even a semester of special education. (The district fired the previous SpEd teacher mid-year after a string of abusive behavior was uncovered. I was asked to put the program back together again so they could hire a "real" teacher for the coming year. I learned what a joy it was to work with kids at that end of the spectrum, and that the paperwork would kill me.) Mostly, however, I was known as a band director.
And it was after one of our many big performance trips, a four-day trip to march in the Portland Rose Festival Parade in 2012, that made me realize that I could no longer handle the physical demands of the job of a high school marching band director. I literally got off the bus at the high school late Sunday night after a long trip home from Portland (including a broken bus in Pendleton), stood watching the crew unloading the bus as the students unpacked their gear and got picked up by parents. I then went inside the building, made sure everyone was cleared out and had their rides home, and went into the auditorium and commiserated with and on the piano for an hour or so. Making sure it was the right decision.
It was. Even with the Lord's healing help that summer, I would not have been able to teach the band that year. Unfortunately, I saw the program deteriorate that year before my eyes under my hand-picked replacement. It fell to my sixteen year old son to tell the recalcitrant students, "Look, my dad is NOT coming back, okay? So suck it up, and make the best of it!"
Meanwhile, I've spent the last four years of my career in charge of the alternative school, where I could be much more sedentary and still help students who needed it. Fortunately, with the reduction and difficulties that have faced that program since I left, I've been in a building across town, where I didn't have to hear about the problems with the band program nearly as often. Heartless, yes. But the current director doesn't want any advice from me, it seems, so there's a limit to what I can do about it. As a Christian, I refuse to lie when someone asks me what I think of the band situation. ("Well, they're working really hard, aren't they?")
That was the kind of program I was running when I started: a small one. In the little town I started in, though, when there were only thirty or so kids in each grade, having twenty-five kids in the high school band was still respectable. I built that program to the point where we had about half the school in grades four and up in the band program. But after eight years in that little school, the educational funding crisis in California had reached the point where they were going to merge my program with the band program in the neighboring town, and that director was retiring, so I'd be running both programs. (They were looking out for me, I'll gladly give them that.) But I could see the writing on the wall - music was a dying part of the California school system.
I moved to Idaho that summer, no job in hand. I'd decided that Boise felt the most like Sacramento had felt when I was a kid (I was 28 that summer), and sure enough, after ten days of applications I had four job offers in hand. (My reputation had followed me north.) I took the one in Kuna ("Q-nah") and taught grades 6-12 for seven years, building the program there from seventeen students in the high school band to the 110 we marched my final year. I taught some math and guitar and electronics and orchestra, but primarily band. As the town grew, and my new wife and I decided we wanted to move farther away from the big city, the school district in Payette offered us the sun and the moon and half the stars to take over their band program. Unfortunately, that offer wasn't really there until the fourth year (after I'd raised quite a stink over broken promises), and that was the general theme of our seven years there. We had some great friends, however, some amazing experiences, and I learned a lot about teaching in - shall we say, difficult circumstances.
And for the last eleven years, I've been here in Jerome, my favorite stop along the way. Now beginning year 34, my 53rd birthday approaching in August, my health deteriorating slowly, I think I have enough strength in me to make it through the 2017-18 school year, especially with the superb assistant teacher I have. And ideally, she and I can help more students rise up from the dregs of scholastic society and make it back on track to graduate.
And by the end of next school year, if we haven't been snatched up by the Second Coming of the Lord by that time, it won't be long after that for us to wait. I feel confident that if we start a 35th school year in the fall of 2018, all the other true Christians and I will fail to finish that school year. At this stage of my life, as fragile as I've gotten, that's the goal: make it to Christ's pick-up date. That may not sound like much of a career goal at this stage, but frankly, that's more important to look forward to than anything about the dying profession of teaching in this country.
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