Try This in a Small Town

     Just the other day a teacher friend asked me about the advantages and disadvantages of teaching in a small-town environment.  My familiarity with the topic began one month after my college graduation and all my fellow graduates and I were desperately seeking gainful employment. My position in a rock band had already been filled, my part time job as a forklift driver had ended and my income and checking account balance were pretty equal at zero.  I saw a notice on the bulletin board in the music building that read “Band Director needed to change the world through music” and was pretty sure it was written just for me. It didn’t really say that, but that’s the way I read it, and I had to find a map to discover exactly where Lamar County Alabama was located. I quickly called and received an application in the mail, completed it and sent it back the next day.  In what seemed to be record time I received a phone call inviting me to an interview.  I was offered the job, not necessarily because I was the best qualified or most impressive candidate but because I am pretty sure I was the only applicant.

     The band parents were invited to meet the new director (me) the following week, and I set out from Oxford in my 71 Vega and made it to Tupelo before my car died. After calling the principal to tell him it didn’t appear I would make it that evening, he asked if I could use my credit card to rent a car.  Rather than explain I neither qualified for nor owned a credit card my reply was simply “no, that’s not possible.” With that less than auspicious beginning I began my 17-year association with small town teaching.

     It only took the smallest available U Haul trailer to move my stuff to town, and the first place I rented was a small room on top of what used to be a garage, but the house it once served was missing. Because I was used to college rentals, I was less than discerning about the quality of lodging than I should have been, and closer inspection showed there was no heat, no ac, no stove and more roaches than I thought possible. I never spent a night there, sleeping in the band room until I could find a real place to live. It didn’t take long to find a house rental for less than an apartment cost in Oxford.

     The town advertised about 1300 residents, but I think their census process may have been a little overly optimistic, and never saw anywhere near that number except at football games or lining the downtown streets at the Christmas parade.  I counted something like 15 churches, many of denominations I had never heard of before, all inside the city limits.  There were dozens more out in the country that I would hear about but only discover gradually after several years of traveling dirt roads and exploring the area.  A few weeks after moving, I had been invited to supper by several of the pastors in town, and discovered not only did they want to meet me, but many of them also wanted me to serve as choir director for their congregations. I wasn’t really interested until I learned it was a paying position, and the Methodist offer was the most attractive.  

     Church membership and regular attendance were a community expectation, and if new arrivals didn’t begin at least Sunday service attendance they could expect regular visits from small groups of parishioners from several of the local churches inviting attendance - regular attendance was implied - at Sunday school, regular Sunday meeting, Sunday night service, Wednesday night service and Wednesday night choir practice as well. Those visits from a variety of denominations would continue until a choice was made to regularly attend one church or the other or until the visiting committees decided, after multiple unsuccessful visitation attempts, that the new folks were simply heathens and not interested in church at all.  The love of God and regular church attendance in many small towns has been for many years a defining characteristic and a primary reason that many of the people chose not just to live there, but to stay there.  Church “congregations” were almost synonymous with “family”, and they watched out for and took care of the folks that needed help in emergencies, tragedies, births, deaths, trials and tribulations regardless of denomination.

     I met most of the band parents at our first official Band Parent meeting and discovered that not only were the parents invariably nice, supportive and genuinely interested in band, they all seemed to already know each other and were willing to take on the responsibilities of running the concession stands on both sides of the football field so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. That was great, because I knew absolutely nothing about it and had no idea where to begin.  Nobody in college ever talked about fundraising being a major part of band operations.  I began to think real life teaching may have been a completely different animal than what we had been told in classes. I also began the process of discovering that almost everyone in town was related to each other but me. That was not a bad thing.

     Finances for school programs, especially in smaller towns, are generally provided by fundraising, and it’s pretty much a fact of life that an active booster organization is a requirement for any program’s success. Band, for example, got zero funds from the school beyond my salary, and I quickly learned that there’s a fine line between sufficient funds and overkill. Raising money with a different sales pitch every month will drive down participation in your program and hit a point of diminishing returns. We ran one fundraiser a semester and had money from football concessions. I made sure we could live on that. Anything more and you are no longer teaching your subject but training salespersons.

     I also learned you never, ever, ever have band practice or any other school event on Wednesday night or Sunday afternoon, and that most businesses closed at lunch on Wednesday because they all had to be open all day on Saturdays when the farmers came to town to do their weekly shopping. Speaking of shopping, since there were two grocery stores in town, I found shopping at each on alternating weeks to be an excellent idea. Both owners were band parents, and yes, they know where and when you shop, and pretty much what you were eating for the week.  There were a couple of clothing stores, a hardware store and a Dollar General or two that I made sure to patronize local businesses as much as possible. It made sense to me I needed to patronize the businesses that supported school programs. Where I shopped, what I bought and a lot of other information about “the new band teacher” was disseminated by the town grapevine information dispersal agency. It was highly effective, faster than light and mostly factual, aided by the fact that more people were related to each other than not, and it was as if a gigantic interpersonal networking web operated over most of the county that was able to send and receive information at intergalactic speeds, even before the internet.

     One particular thing I discovered over the next few months and years is that very few of the people I met were anything other than what they appeared to be. Preachers, bank tellers, farmers, policemen (all three of them), truckers, lawyers, teachers and bootleggers (it was a dry county) all seemed comfortable not only with who they were but also with who everyone else either was or thought they were.   Small towns are places where you can call the mayor, the superintendent, the judge and every other public official by their first name and none of them are offended. They are also approachable, and unafraid of questions and invariably honest (for politicians) with their answers. There was little pretension, social climbing or snootiness, and while some might be a little more judgmental from time to time than others, it wasn’t a character trait that was often mimicked or admired, and those that had it more often than not tried their best not to express their opinions to any but their closest friends. 

     I found very few loudmouth people. The old football coach was loud, but that was the result of so many years on the football field dealing with teenage boys and not because he wanted to be the center of attention. The overwhelming majority of people went about their business and their daily lives with an aura of quiet self-assurance that portrayed both confidence and kindness and a general comfort both with themselves, their families and the people with whom they chose to associate. It was a standard I admired and sought, with varying degrees of success, to imitate.

     The town was small - you could drive from the north end to the south in less than 4 minutes, and from east to west in less than that. There was the obligatory town square with the courthouse in the middle and several businesses around the square that made up what passed for “uptown.” The businesses seemed to be fluid and changed frequently. The garment plant, several long-haul trucking companies, the bank, the school and the Hyster manufacturer 10 miles north were the primary employers other than farming. Most farms were no larger than what one or two people could work in a day with only a few exceptions. There were several neighborhoods where children played and rode their bikes freely, and parents still watched out for all of them and not just their own. Crime was like that in Mayberry, there was some but by big city standards it was almost nonexistent. 

     One real positive I learned was that over a period of just a few short months, I met an enormous number of extremely helpful and knowledgeable people. It seemed that no matter the gaps in my personal experience and/or expertise I had met someone more than willing to share their opinions, advice and wisdom. Not only that, but the more people I met the more I began to feel I was becoming a real part of the local community, and it felt a lot like being part of an overgrown extended family that genuinely cared for and about each other. Oh sure, there were always individuals that were exceptions to everything, but they were thankfully few and far between. 

     Hunting and fishing were a big deal, and I learned to never schedule any event (concert, marching band festival, band parent meeting) on the opening day of deer season.  I was a regular member of a hunting club, and several friends also invited me to deer hunts with their dogs. Several guys also had squirrel dogs and rabbit dogs, and in season those were all day Saturday events. There were hundreds of private ponds and creeks and a county owned fishing lake, and I became an avid outdoorsman known primarily for an enormous amount of effort with marginal success. I did learn, however, to talk a good game at the teacher lunch table even if my trophies didn’t quite match up to Bill Dance or Daniel Boone.  I also learned that some of the best parts of outdoor sports can be learning to talk a good game.

     I learned that good teaching is good teaching regardless of the subject, and that observing other teachers in your building was an important way to diminish the enormous amount of teacher stuff they neglected to teach you in college.  Visiting directors from nearby towns was another big step in learning from guys that already had experience, and that it was okay not to know everything you needed to know to be better at what you were teaching. Several faculty members had been teaching longer than I had been alive, and getting to watch them in action - in the halls, in their classroom, in department meetings and even in the lunchroom - and I learned that anger was an exercise in futility in student control, to get more attention by talking softer rather than louder, and that if you didn’t write down what you wanted to do in a class beforehand you would end up making much less progress than if you did. 

      I used to hear other directors talk about looking for employment in towns or schools where “they had better kids,” but my personal observations taught me the trick about finding better students was to be more efficient and effective at teaching the ones you had, and that if you couldn’t reach the students you had now you probably wouldn’t reach new ones in different places either.  In other words, the problem was never the quality of the students but the quality of the teacher that made a difference. A friend once observed “I don’t think they’re hiding the good kids from us at home.” He was correct.

     With about 600 students in grades 6-12, the competition for students was pretty intense.  I tried to let students make their own decisions, and if my first chair trombone wanted to try football, let him try it but keep a spot for him in marching band just in case the football idea didn’t work out. Cheerleaders, girls’ volleyball, girls’ softball, boys’ baseball, track and wrestling were also part of the competition, but just like with football, I never tried to convince a kid one thing was better or worse than the other, just let them try it and work with their schedule as much as possible.

     It was also much easier to reach the goal of personalization in education with small town kids, I think in large part because the distractions are fewer. I’m sure, from my experience long ago as a teenager, some of them would have driven the 30 mile round trip to the nearest beer store or the 50 mile round trip to the nearest liquor store as sneakily as they could, but they were also aware that the probability somebody’s parent would drive by and see their vehicle parked at either one and make their parents aware was a definite probability. There were only a couple of fast-food places to hang around, and only so many times you might drive around the square on Saturday night looking for your homies. Many of the teenagers would end up, just like we did, parked at a corner on the main drag and seeing who might drive by and who might stop. I will remind you that most of this was well before cell phones, so chance played a rather large role in teenage behaviors unless prior arrangement had been made.  They were in the band room before school, during lunch, after school and I honestly believed most of them looked forward to our weekly Thursday night rehearsal as much as I did. They also loved to talk about how tough they had it with the two a day rehearsals in summer band camp. I got to know each student and their respective family members, and often had younger brothers and sisters and cousins following in the older siblings’ footsteps, and some parents that continued to be active in the band parents’ group even after their child had graduated. 

     So what happened in my small town was the same thing that happens in so many others everywhere.  We did change the world through music, only it wasn’t in the way I thought it would happen. Through music, directors like me taught life skills, cooperation, delayed gratification, the benefits of working together, the advantages of building an organization based on collective goals and achievement, the necessity of personal dedication and commitment and what it meant to be a contributing part of something bigger than yourself. It also meant building relationships that were based on shared commitment and trust that lasted far longer than the few short years of participation during high school. Learning an instrument was an added bonus and, like learning a foreign language, adds a unique dimension to a child’s growth and personality development unlike any other subject or skill. That’s how we did change the world through music, not with a revolution but doing it one kid at a time. It was and is a glorious achievement that’s often hard to see when it’s happening but is oh so obvious with the lens of retrospection. All in all, the advantages of small-town teaching far outweigh the disadvantages, and I wouldn’t trade my experiences there for anything. So, thanks to the hundreds of small-town kids that created what was to us a big-time program, and for making a difference in my life and in so many others, all of it through the guise of learning music. Small towns are the heart of America and I learned as much or more than I was able to teach. From my perspective it was a wonderful trade.