I am a chorus teacher. I had debated whether or not to write this post, because I was concerned that it would give away my identity. Being a pagan teacher that is open about their spirituality has mostly resulted in job loss for me, so I hide it now. I did the math and realized just how many chorus teachers there are in my state alone and figured I was safe from being found out.

The thing about chorus is that it seems to be the most underrated of musical ensembles. I also didn’t start out wanting to be a chorus teacher. I was a band geek in high school. I played three instruments. I started taking chorus because I needed it to give me the 5 music credits I needed to avoid taking a language. We went through three chorus teachers my four years of high school. I just took it for the credits and because I liked accompanying for them on the piano. I went to college as an instrumental major and switched to a piano major. I didn’t realized that my emphasis switched from instrumental to vocal once I became a piano major. I didn’t discover it until my senior year when I was placed with a chorus teacher for my student teaching. I tried to get jobs teaching band, but only ended up teaching band as well as chorus in small schools.

I wish it was just me that underrated chorus as a musical ensemble, but it seems to be pretty universal. Most of my friends are band or orchestra teachers. They always post these great memes from these band or orchestra Facebook pages. I decided to look up chorus Facebook pages and came up short. There are very few chorus memes out there. Why is that? I tried to find various YouTube videos trying to figure out how to help my chorus get better and there wasn’t much either. There is something called ChoralNet, but again, people really don’t post often. Why is there no real sense of community between choral educators? Why isn’t there more sharing of information? It is very alienating and very frustrating.

I currently am the only chorus teacher in a small school. That means I get to teach the students at every grade level of chorus. I have an elementary chorus, a middle school chorus, and a high school chorus. My elementary chorus is huge with kids that mostly like to sing, learn quickly, and are proud of the end result. They aren’t terribly interested in putting in any extra time, but they seem to like chorus well enough. My middle school chorus is small. The students don’t sing loudly and is filled with the typical middle school attitude where they are afraid to show interest in anything because it isn’t cool. I know for a fact that maybe half of them really love to sing, but wouldn’t want that fact publicized. My high school chorus is a moderate size with a mix of students who love to sing and really want to be there (about 1/3 of the students) and the rest who are there because they need a music credit and because the grade will help bring up their average. In my teaching experience, this is pretty typical of all three of these age groups.

If I truly want to become good at my craft (for a number of years I was content to merely be “good enough”), I need to figure out how to balance creating a good concert, which is what my administrators, the parents, and the community expect; and teaching them what the national standards for music say I should teach them to become good musicians. Yes, they just came out with a new set of standards. While I mostly like this set of standards better, I was mostly taught how to teach the previous standards, so there is going to be an adjustment period for me where I have to learn new things. I have the additional problem of all of the students who have no interest in learning anything from me, especially the high schoolers. I think I mentioned that 2/3 of that chorus only want to do the minimum required to get their high grade that they have come to expect from chorus. These are kids that expect a “free day” whenever there is a substitute teacher. They also ask for it on a regular basis in both my middle and high schools. If I make chorus too difficult or spend too much time teaching concepts, I will have students quit and lower numbers look bad for me.

And then there is the topic of guys. Once there is a specific section for guys in middle school, you need to have enough guys to fill that section. Except society has been telling guys for years that singing isn’t manly. Even if you are a guy and you like to sing, you hit puberty and then your voice stops doing what you want it to as it adjusts to a newer lower range. And this can actually happen more than once. One of my tenors is 16 years old and just changed to a bass. He complained that his voice wasn’t acting right for the last three months. I told him not to worry and that it’s just his voice settling into a new lower range. So for every one of those changes, guys get more self-conscious because they are not singing the right notes and they know they are not singing the right notes. The other guys are just there to get a good grade and fool around. In each of my guys sections I am lucky to have one that enjoys singing and wants to be there. The others just fool around.

Everything you read here is nothing new to chorus teachers. We have to walk a fine line because we are an elective. We have to have students want to join chorus. Without numbers, we really wouldn’t exist. But I want my students to become good musicians and good singers. I want our group to be proud of themselves for what they can do instead of being indifferent with students sneaking looks at their cell phones behind their folders. Ugh.