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"All right everyone," Mrs. Smith said, holding her arms up like a conductor. She put them back down so that we could not see them on the keys of the upright piano. The chords we had come to recognize as the beginning of "Yellow Submarine" rang through the music room.

"In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea," we sang out, as if some great disaster would befall us if we did not. "And he told us of a life, in the land of submarines."

The song complete, Mrs. Smith stood with energy only a younger teacher could have, causing her dark, bobbed hair to jingle. My brother's demented and perverted friend talked about his lustful fantasies of Mrs. Smith, but I couldn't see her youthful charm in those days. I would never have called her ugly, but her charm was hidden from my eyes that she was trim and sprightly.

She used to be Miss Lily, but married a mean, bald guy that substituted for our class back at Christmas time and was particularly chagrined at the tremolo we habitually produced when going from C to E on the word "peace." "No, no! It's not pea-EEESS," he intoned, mocking the amateur production of the interval change as if his voice had suddenly become one of those circus whistles with a moveable stick. He played that measure again with a calm, measured expression that should have convinced us that it was far more sophisticated to do it his way, though I am pretty sure not one of us knew what the hell he was trying to get us not to do.

"Good job," Mrs. Smith said, moving our little placard up one notch on the graph that measured our progress throughout the entire year just over the chalkboard in the music room. In September, each classroom proposed and elected a name for the class, which Mrs. Smith wrote on a placard and placed at the bottom of the graph. Each week we learned at least one song and were expected to sing it with all of our hearts. Should the class fully participate and show adequate respect for the charade, Mrs. Smith moved the placard up one notch. To get the grand prize, your class competed each week with all of the other classes in your grade. Starting at the bottom of the chart in August, by the end of the year, whichever class was the highest on the chart won a fully funded schmeer at McDonald's, courtesy of Mrs. Smith and her music budget for the year. It isn't a foreign concept in education to base the merits of success with a particular skill solely on reward. For someone who likely taught music out of devotion, I can't imagine gaining a whole lot of satisfaction out of convincing a bunch of tone-deaf pre-teens that singing loudly, and with accuracy and depth of feeling, feigned or no, is at least worth a hamburger and French fries at McDonald's at the end of the school year.

Our class had chosen to be called "Stamper's Stompers," a clever little play on our teacher, Mr. Stamper's name. Indeed, there was a Mr. Stamper, and a Mrs. Stamper, his wife, at South Elementary, and the same name had been chosen by every class who'd had either of them as teachers for all the years I'd gone to South. Even then, I thought it was a tad clich, but what is one voice against such an established convention?

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