As I See It: Even at careers’ end, teachers live on in their students

The last day of this school year marked the end of my 28 years of teaching elementary music. Retirement is the birth of a new phase of life, but I grieve the death of my career. The final strains my students sang with me this spring evoked a flood of memories from my many fulfilling years of making music with kids.

Through nearly three decades, not a single day of teaching elementary music has been dull. From helping kindergartners find their singing voices to teaching sixth-graders to connect with the meaning and expression in a song was all very rewarding.

I’ve loved teaching a variety of instruments, including recorders, keyboards, percussion and my favorite: guitars. It was my great pleasure to introduce students to all genres of music, including the masterworks of classical music (my favorite). Last week a graduating high school senior told me she still loves “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s exciting “Carmina Burana.” She remembered hearing it for the first time in my sixth-grade music class. Once, upon returning from a Kansas City Symphony concert, a sixth-grade boy said, “Mr. Potter, you were right. The Kauffman Center is beautiful, but the music was spectacular!”

It was always great fun to channel the constant motion and physical energy of elementary students into movement games, actions or sign language with songs, and folk and line dances.

I’ve always been proud to be a teacher. It was my privilege to work beside hundreds of colleagues who devoted their lives to the betterment of kids. I am grateful to have been in a career with like-minded professionals in an environment that nurtured creativity, industry and nobility. People who spend their energy and life force on behalf of children, often in the face of daunting challenges, are uplifting to be around.

I thank the Shawnee Mission School District for the opportunity to teach, for the support to do it well, for valuing music education so highly, and for actually paying me to do what I love. I thank the National Education Association for the important ways it supports public education. I thank all the thousands of families who came to concerts, brought their child to early morning choir rehearsals week after week, and paid for field trips to hear the Kansas City Symphony. I especially want to thank parents who took the time to write me a note of appreciation for how the music I taught had positively impacted their child. It meant more than I can say.

I will miss the relationships I’ve had with my students: the spirit they brought to my class, their clever remarks, their insights, their unique perspectives, their earnest and enthusiastic capacity for making music, their burdens, their smiles and their hearts.

To the thousands of kids I’ve had the pleasure, honor and privilege to experience music with for 28 years, I offer my profound appreciation. I’m proud of what we did together. I thank you for letting me encourage and nurture the musician within you, helping to guide its emergence in your singing voice, in your beat-competent hands and feet and into your minds and hearts. My mission was that your lives could be richer and fuller through the joy and meaning of music. I know because of you, my life has been richer and fuller far beyond any expectation I had when I became a teacher 28 years ago.

Music teachers don’t really retire. A little part of them lives on through the musician inside each of their students.

This story was originally published June 9, 2015 at 3:43 PM with the headline "As I See It: Even at careers’ end, teachers live on in their students."