THAT FINAL CONCERT

That Final Jefferson Junior High School Concert

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            I had just been hired to teach at Jefferson Junior High, and was a bit surprised to learn that they wanted me to start immediately after the Christmas holiday break instead of waiting for the semester to end.  I wondered why the rush to get me started.  I found out why, not from the school administrators, but from my landlady on the second day I spent in her house.  If I had known why, I probably would not have taken the job, as I had two other opportunities in my pocket.

            "Did you know" said the landlady (wife of one of the high school teachers), "that there were two people ahead of you on this junior high music and English job?"  Well, of course not; I had assumed there was one, and that that person had quit for some good reason before the end of the school year.  The landlady was enjoying this. 

            "Yes, there were two men.  The first lasted only four weeks before he quit, and the second was asked to resign by Christmas.  The kids were too tough for them; they were completely out of control."

            You couldn't tell if she expected me to resign on the spot or wait until I had failed miserably.  So that was the start of my eight-year "tour of duty" at Jefferson.

            The first half year (their second semester) I managed to pull together a passable bit of music from my choral groups.  There were plenty of kids who wanted to be in the choruses (girls only, boys only, and mixed), but not necessarily to sing.  Perhaps some came because they wanted to participate in the forced departure of the third guy, me.  One of the two English classes was a disaster as many of the students had been promoted to the ninth grade just to push them out of the system.  Several of them could not read more than "is", "the", and perhaps "he."   The other ninth grade English class was made up of regular kids who could read, write, think, and enjoyed doing it.  The seventh grade General Music classes were not brilliant, and not brilliantly taught either, but both the students and I learned a lot.

            Probably the Superintendent of Schools and the Jefferson Principal took some heat from the public and the School Board for the chaos in the school, so I was in good favor with them.  I actually signed up for another full year.  That year showed a good improvement in the students' attitudes and we got some music and English taught.  I use the word "we" because beginning teachers like me learn more than the students.  The following year I asked for, and got, a year leave of absence without pay to work full-time on a Master's degree at the University of Minnesota. When I returned I was pleasantly surprised to find that the year-long substitute teacher had done a fine job and I had some good singers coming up.

            But problems arose.  The first was that there was a big statewide push going for remedial reading classes, several years too late for that first English class of mine unfortunately, and I did not want this push to take me out of music, worthy though the cause might be.  And I had no confidence in the materials that would be required.  The next thing that irked me was that when the high school choral music teacher resigned to move to St. Paul and I applied for that position, I was turned down for some outsider.  This happened, I found out, in part because the Jefferson Principal said he did not want to break up his successful team of teachers.  This was mildly flattering, but not enough to keep me aboard.  I resigned in February, to take effect at the end of the school year.

            I did not want it said of me that I sloughed off work, now that I couldn't be fired anymore, so I put a great deal of effort into all my teaching and especially my mixed choir.  It was really fine, and I had a couple of ninth grade basses who could sing a low E flat, plus a good number of others who could hold their own on the medium and higher bass parts.  Tenors were never a problem as the younger seventh and eighth grade fellows had not completely changed voices and were capable of gloriously high tenor notes.  We could always find a substitute note, or a different octave for the low notes they could not sing.  Altos and sopranos were not a problem either; they all had had note reading experience in my general music classes.

            So came the night in late spring which was to be my farewell concert.  The instrumental students played first, but I had no hand in the teaching of instruments.  Then came the various choral groups, boys, girls, and lastly the big mixed chorus, the Jefferson Choir.  Forty boys and forty girls.  These were not picked out to make the numbers match; it just happened that there were equal numbers of boys and girls.  All the music was four-part, and probably a third of it was sung without accompaniment.  I thought we would blow the audience away.  They were blown away, but not quite as I expected.

            I had the kids come up on the step risers from both aisles, and climb up from both ends, just like the fine college choirs in Minnesota do.  The piano accompanist came next, and then I followed, thinking proudly of the dignity, the musicianship, the poise of these young ladies and gentlemen.  This was the way to go out, right?

            My wife and my two young daughters (two and four) were seated in the first row of the small balcony of the gym.  There were probably around two hundred fifty people in the audience.  I put the music on the stand, signaled the choir to be ready to begin, the audience became very quiet, and at the dramatic moment when I should have dropped my arm for the down beat of the first number, I stopped dead in the middle of the gesture to listen to my two-year-old saying, loud and clear from the balcony, “Dats my daddy down dere!"

            The audience was indeed blown away with laughter and fun, but all settled down in the due course of events and we had the concert that we had worked on for so long.