"Teach your children well..."

This fall, I taught a community ed class at Southwest High School on the subject of songwriting. It was my first time teaching that subject, and I had ten enthusiastic students. During the six week class, I ended up writing four new songs. One of these celebrated a playoff game the Twins won against Toronto. Another described a fight I witnessed while waitng for a bus in downtown Minneapolis. On the final day of the class, I asked my students to perform songs they had written. The one that really stood out for me was a waltz written by a couple in which they honored their accordion teacher. The husband played his small accordion, and the song proved to be quite a hit.

I've been teaching community ed classes at Southwest High for more than thirty years. Most of these revolved around music. I taught harmonica, guitar, banjo, and tin whistle. In one class, I introduced jug band tunes, and in another I facilitated a folk music jam. The latter proved to be one of my most rewarding experiences since three of my students decided to keep on meeting to jam after the class was finished. The four of us not only became good friends, but we continued to jam on a regular basis for more than 15 years. Calling ourselves

The Waxing Nostalgics, we performed at several Minneapolis venues, and eventually recoded a tape of our favorite songs.

However, teaching for me wasn't always a positive experience. I remember the first class I ever taught took place in Marburg, my hometown in Germany, where I moved to when I was twenty-four years old, and lived in for almost three years. During that time, I taught an informal class in English conversation to adult students from a medical institute called Die Behringwerke. I remember how scared I was, and how intimidated I felt when the students asked me questions about English grammar and syntax. I was very relieved when that class came to an end. Nor did I attempt to teach there again. It wasn't until ten years later that I faced a classroom.

You might think that teaching should have come easy for me since my dad was a highly esteemed college professor at Xavier University where he taught English literature for more than 30 years. He not only loved teaching, but he also won two teacher-of-the-year awards during his career. Upon retirement, he was honored by becoming a professor emeritus. But the idea of teaching terrified me. I could never imagine myself facing classrooms of thirty to forty undergraduates every week, grading papers, and preparing tests, when I had a hard time doing an oral report in front of ten graduate seminar students. In fact, when I was offered a teaching assistantship in English literature after a year of graduate school at Ohio State, I ended up dropping out of school completely rather than face a classroom of freshman composition students. And I'm glad I did! I think it would have proven to be a disaster!

A year after that, I applied to get into the Peace Corps, where, if I'd been accepted, I would have been sent to Seoul, South Korea to teach English to university students. It turned out to be a good thing that I wasn't accepted because teaching students overseas would have been even more traumatic. Yes, it took me almost twenty years after graduating from Xavier University before I gained enough confidence to face a classroom. Teaching community ed was a lot less stressful since classes were usually small, the students were motivated to learn, and there weren't any discipline problems.