Happy Teacher Appreciation Week

This morning, I ran into a parent of one of my former elementary music students. She told me that her son had just received a "Most Inspirational" award in his junior high choir.

"And it's because of you," his mother said.

This past week was Teacher Appreciation Week, and let me tell you, it comes at exactly the right time of the year for us teachers.

It started me thinking about the teachers who had influenced me and my career path. (Funny, most of the names that popped into my head were music and English teachers. Go figure.)

I am a product of several wonderful educators both in the public school system and at the collegiate level. But I thought, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, I would share one story in particular.

I was in the ninth grade, which was still in the junior high school. It was my second year of choir, and I was a little more confident than the previous year.

But I still didn't want to try out for a solo, and I wasn't sure the choir director knew who I was at the time.

My choir was singing a choral arrangement of Carole King's song, "Tapestry."

Funny thing about the Tapestry album. It was a source of family tension.

Somebody (this is how my dad said the word every time he told the story, while looking pointedly at my mother) had gotten rid of the record album in a garage sale or in a move or something, and we never heard the end of it.

My mother, brother, and I even bought a new copy of Tapestry on cassette (no such thing as CDs or MP3s back then, Millennials) for my dad, but he said it wasn't the same without the album art and jacket.

Weird how we all (including my father) still sang along to every song in the car, even though it was inferior to vinyl.

When it was time to audition for the solo in choir, my friend convinced me to try out with her, and our director allowed us to sing it at the same time. The next day, he announced that I would be singing the solo.

I consider that day to be the beginning of my calling as a music educator.

I decided to surprise my parents. I didn't tell them that I would be singing a solo at the fall choir concert, but I was so excited that I had to tell someone.

I told my six-year-old brother, swore him to secrecy. Some of you are probably saying, "Yeah, right. There is no way a first grader kept a secret from his mom and dad for that many weeks."

But he did. In fact, at the concert, he tried to steal the program from them so that they wouldn't see my name.

I still remember coming to the microphone and seeing my family's happy faces and my mother wagging her finger at me from the audience.

That same choir director continued to inspire me and believe in me throughout the rest of junior high and high school.

He also provided me with a snapshot memory of my mother that I would truly value two decades later.

Thank you, Mr. Smack.

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue,

An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view

A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold

A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

From "Tapestry" by Carole King

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