The Check Is in the Mail

The years I spent as a middle school and high school choral teacher in the rural South were years of struggle similar to what public school choral directors still face. I was lucky though: I was not a single mother. A working husband kept the poverty line below what a two-earner family might accrue when one of them was on a teacher’s salary. But in looking back I can remember a time I almost left the profession due to a pay cut. Had I done so it might have meant missing the real paycheck.

Our city school merged with the county. An ad valorem tax in the city had provided adequate funding for arts classes and for a small supplement to be paid to teachers who spent considerable after school and evening time working with students. All of us appreciated what it said, though the cash value was miniscule.

The merger tossed out the supplement for everyone except coaches, who ended up with a subsequent raise about equal to the funding other non-athletic teachers had previously received, divided by the inflated coaching numbers employed in the county.

I was furious. A number of us talked about walkout, no union membership notwithstanding. The thought of our students held us hostage. The new county school board members were able to call all of us by first name after the meeting we attended. Later, other names were also heard by us.

Many years after that, I moved into full time church music work. It was a call, not an abdication of the teaching profession. The pay was even worse, the stress greater and the hours longer. My family suspected a masochistic character flaw.

Now that I am semi-retired, working only with young professional musicians as a mentor and directing an average community choir for nearly free, I am seeing the real paycheck start to come in, though my husband and I must live on less now as retirees.

My email box contains frequent messages from former students and church choir members thanking me for favors I often don’t even remember. I’ve moved old school annuals and church membership photo books into my office as important reference and research tools, replacing the choral methods books I thought I could never live without.

Students A, B and C are directing their own groups now. They call me sometimes with the same questions I used to pose to my mentor. My answers are not always like his.

Student D calls to say he thought of me and the choir when he heard the “Ave verum corpus” on the radio one day. He has forgotten the composer but can still sing the bass line. He does. It's the Byrd. He was a student who rarely remembered to take his coat with him on leaving the rehearsal.

Student E writes to ask the best way to start out her still-in-the-womb first child on a musical path. I tell her to sing, starting now, every day. I tell her abut the "Singing in the Bathtub" CD by John Lithgow and Kenny Loggin lullabies.

An alto I directed 25 years ago writes and asks if I am the former teacher she had in 7th grade general music class. She has run across a Choraltalk post with my name on it. “Do you remember me?” she asks, “I was the one who kept ending up in detention for talking during rehearsals”, as if she was the only sinner. I scramble for the junior high annual and vaguely recall the face, having completely forgotten the sin. We do lunch when she’s in town. She turned out pretty cool. She’s directing a youth choir at her church. She doesn't allow extraneous conversation, she says, but lacks the advantage of a detention hall.

A former private voice student tracks me down to tell me about her leading role in a regional opera production and can I come? I check the flight cost and brainstorm what I can do without for a while.

A now handicapped septuagenarian from a former church choir sends me a Christmas card from out of the blue and writes “Do you remember when you made me do all that Latin stuff in that long piece by whats-his-name - MOE-ZART - and I said to you, ‘Woman, if you ever put me through that again I going to have kiss you full on the mouth’?” Yes, I remember. So does my husband.

Time has not stopped for me as a retiree. To the contrary: I am ever hungry to learn new things because I remember how useful and rewarding earlier learning was. I still have to know all about new choral composers, new technologies, new societal pressures singers face. I’m going to get other calls and questions from Teachers A, B and C who are struggling, on still small salaries, to find answers. I have to be there for them.

I like the view from the ground they still cede to me. It means I am still a teacher, now ‘employed’ in the choral music field as a ‘consultant’. I think got a promotion at last.

So I leave an important message to all those incredible music teachers out there, underpaid, overworked, often mired in and shafted by the bureaucracy, asked to do things on a personal level for their students that a teacher in another discipline might refuse. Now hear this:

The check is in the mail. Don’t let the time stamp on the envelope fool you.