AN INTERESTING JOB

Teaching is Always an Interesting Job

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     Teaching can be the worst job in the world one day, and the next day it can be the best, but boring it is not.  As everyone must have read at one time or another, excuses – whether they are forged or not – can be quite inventive and amusing.  Here are two from my experience.  In a large junior high school (grades 7, 8, and 9), managing a large class is quite an undertaking.  Kids of this age are squirrelly, loud, and still at the stage where they tend to poke each other for no reason except to poke.  So as a general music teacher, I was expected to have my music classes sing for two major concerts during the year. 

     I had four sections of 60 ninth graders, which gave me a chorus of 240 singers.  These sections were rehearsed separately, and there was at least one mass rehearsal of everybody at once.  I should have had some support in disciplining all these people, but for some reason the support never materialized.     Obviously, if you have a choir of 240 voices, there is not much chance of the music being ruined by the presence of only 239 voices, but after all, this was a part of the class work of these kids, and I was responsible to take roll and find out who was absent for the concert.  In this particular case there were the usual number of sick kids, and other legitimate excuses, but the one that truly floored me was the note I got from one girl's mother.  "Please excuse little Prunella from missing the concert, as she had to go to her dog's graduation."  DOG'S GRADUATION!!  The note went on to say that Precious Poochie (or whatever its name was) had been attending an obedience school and little Prunella was required to be there so the dog could demonstrate that he had learned the basic commands given by the person (little Prunella) who had gone through the obedience school with him.

     Of course I was thinking of the near nervous breakdowns that I had had getting all this music and all these kids put together.  A dog's graduation was more important than this great concert that I had sweat blood over?  Unthinkable!  Later, I did think about it a little, and was willing to just maybe see a tiny bit of merit in this excuse, but I still have trouble with it.  Since her mother wrote out the excuse and even phoned me to explain just why little Prunella had to be there, I remember that I did not give her a low grade because of it. 

     At West High School (grades 10, 11, l2), I was in perhaps my third year there, and was beginning to get the benefit of all the 9th grade kids I had trained in the years before.  The students knew me well by this time, and I thought that I had the beginnings of a first-rate high school choir program.  This particular year was especially good, I thought, with fine singers and lots of esprit de corps.  One of my best basses, a senior, had been running errands for his mother, going to the grocery store with the family car being one of them.  This was in winter, with very slippery streets, and he had the bad luck to be at an intersection simultaneously with a semi-truck.  I gather from what he said, that it was a kind of slow motion accident, neither vehicle being able to stop, and the family Ford being rolled up into a small ball underneath the trailer.  I saw the wrecked car later, and was astounded that the young man had survived.  His injuries were fairly superficial but painful, and he was in a wheelchair for perhaps two weeks.  This mishap occurred a few days before the Christmas concert, and so I was equally astounded to get a phone call from his mother saying that Dave wanted to sing in the concert, and, would it be all right for him to sit, rather than stand while singing.  Of course it was OK with me and the concert went well.

     One of the girls, however, was missing.  I thought that with morale that high, and loyalty to the choir that strong, surely something terrible had happened to prevent her from coming and singing.  Nope.  I got a call from her mother a couple of days later explaining that as they left the house together, it started to rain, and she (the mother) was afraid they would get their hair too wet, and so stayed away.  My belief is that the girl would have come if she had been allowed to.

     Green Bay is a northern city and extreme cold can be expected now and then in winter.  One of my favorite girl members of the choir was Patty Hunt.  Besides being little and cute, she was friendly to all and was well liked by the other girls and boys in the senior class.  Her father had one of the monster Packard sedans that came out after WWII and before the ill-fated merger with Studebaker and the following demise of both.  This was a big car, driven by a just-barely-five-foot girl.  On one of the mornings when it got down to about minus 15 F, there were cars that wouldn't start; one of them was the Packard.  There had been snow as well, and there were students drifting in, half an hour to an hour late.  Patty came in, looking disconsolate, at noon.

     "Patty, we missed you.  What happened, didn't your car start?"

     "No, I tried and tried but couldn't get it going, and my dad had already left in the truck.  There was nothing I could do."

     "So what did you do, finally?"

     "I cried all morning."

     Then we have the story of the young lady, a senior, who came to me one morning for advice.  It seems that music teachers are approached more often on personal matters than any other teacher except  the regular counselor.  Her problem was that she knew this young man who was in the Air Force, and who was on the point of leaving for the Far East.  They had not known each other for very long, but liked each other well enough so that the young man had proposed marriage to her, and wanted an answer before he shipped out in a week or so.  What did I think, should she say yes?  I was dumbfounded.  I didn't know him at all, and she had never talked to me very much before either.  I thought she might possibly take my advice, and I would be responsible for whatever kind of a marriage it would turn out to be.  What to do?  Our conversation went as follows:

     "Debbie, I believe that you are a good Catholic, isn't that so?"

     "Yes".

     "And the Catholic doctrine does not allow divorce?"

     "That's right."

     "And you are a devout believer in the Catholic doctrine?"

     "Yes."

     "Now, Debbie, if you say yes to this man, and if you marry him, do you realize that this is the only proposal of marriage you will ever get?"

     I don't recall what her response was to the last question but I know that this started another interesting train of thought in her mind.  I left West High School, and Green Bay not long after this exchange, and I never knew whether the romance and the marriage continued, but I do hope that my questions to her helped her to an intelligent decision, and a thoughtful approach to marriage.