In middle school the elective I always chose was choir. For each year of middle school I had a different choir teacher. In sixth grade I had Ms. Randor. She had almost daisy yellow blonde hair and had a rotund shape. She was loud and funny and great at teaching her students the basics of reading music. She decided to leave Desert Ridge middle school to direct the show choir at Eldorado high school after the school year finished. I think she still teaches there.

In seventh grade I had Ms. Pugmire now, Mrs. Olsen. Ms. Pugmire was twenty six when she taught our advanced choir. She was stick thin and had an odd fashion sense. She was an engaging teacher and really pushed us to sing the best that we possibly could. Ms. Pugmire taught us music that was difficult to learn but we did it, and did it very well apparently, because we won first place in the state choir competition that year. It was a really great time for me and all my classmates. “Ms. Pug,” as we called her, made my experience in choir the most fun it had ever been and sparked my passion for singing even more. Close to the end of the school year she got married to her boyfriend of four years and moved to Utah with him.

In eighth grade, I was hesitant to be in choir. I knew we definitely wouldn’t be as good as we were the previous year. When I walked into the choir room on the first day of school I saw some of my classmates in their seats talking and standing by the piano was a person with their back to me. My first thought was, “Oh, I have a male choir teacher for the first time.” I brushed it off because it was no big deal to me I and took a seat by my best friend, Raine, and began talking with her about how we finally had a class together since sixth grade. We were mid conversation when then the teacher turned around.

To my surprise, our teacher was not a man, but a very manly woman. Ms. Kiner had boy cut silver hair spiked up with gel. She had broad square shoulders that made her oversized dark gray polo look strange tucked into her black slacks. She wore polished leather loafers with tassels on the top that made the shoe look clunky and uncomfortable. We were all a bit shocked to say the least.

Right when Ms. Kiner gave us one of our first pieces of music we could tell that our class was going to be terrible. I still remember the annoying song, The Rhythm of Life. It wasn’t challenging for us in any way and it was plain annoying. Ms. Kiner lost a lot of our respect because of her song choices.

Ms. Kiner was not a kind woman either. When we would ask for help on one of our parts she always seemed exasperated, like it was too much work to do her job. Because of this, we stopped asking for help when we were confused and just winged it which made us sound terrible. Ms. Kiner didn’t really seem to care as long as she couldn’t hear the mistake. She would always try to make sure that everything in class went exactly her way, mostly singing but other things too, or she would get upset with us.

I can clearly remember what Ms. Kiner would do when she got mad; she would rest her elbow on the top of the piano, curl her hand into a fist, rest her mouth on her clenched fist and move her hand in front and on sides of her mouth, sort of like she was feeling her knuckles with her lips. It was an odd habit but I found it hilarious, as did my friend Grace, who sat next to me. We would laugh each time she performed this action because to be honest, she looked so neurotic that we couldn’t help but laugh.

Ms. Kiner was always getting mad at us. No one in the class really cared too much about it though. We couldn’t really be blamed for not caring because Ms. Kiner was equally, if not more terrible to us. Her room smelled of smoke as she always had a cigarette every day at lunch. She thought that she was very sneaky about it but it was obvious to us and to the other teachers. Ms. Kiner also didn’t have much regard for personal space. She would often touch our shoulders or rub our backs while talking to us in a way that made us all uncomfortable. This was always a topic of conversation during class.
“Who’s back will she rub next?”
“Will she breathe her smoke breath in your face again?”
“Did she put her face really close to yours this time?”
Ms. Kiner definitely had a reputation amongst us choir kids. Ms. Kiner also had another habit that we enjoyed making fun of during class. She licked her lips. A lot. So much so that one day, when I walked to choir class a boy named Cody was waiting at the door outside the room telling each student what to do when they took their seats.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“When you walk in grab your folder and slap it on your legs every time Kiner licks her lips.” Cody was whispering even though there weren’t any teachers around to hear us.
“Why?”
“Just do it. It’ll be fun, trust me.”

I walked into the class not knowing if I was going to perform this odd request, but when I saw the chaos already unfolding I knew that I needed to do it. Everyone was slapping their folders on their legs and yelled out a number in the twenties. She had already licked her lips around twenty times in the first ten minutes of the period. I immediately retrieved my folder and took my seat, ready to participate in further angering my awful teacher. The more upset and confused Ms. Kiner became, the more she licked her lips. That day we successfully wasted half of our class and got up to a count of eighty three. We were very proud of ourselves.

Another instance of her terrible teaching was when our last formal performance was coming up, right before our pops concert (the pops concert was when we performed multiple pop songs, as the title entails). At that point in the year, I think it was March, we were all over Ms. Kiners horrible teaching and sour attitude. I had already learned my part in the song that we were working on and while Ms. Kiner was working the other sections, I would read. I was in a very big reading phase that year and I wanted to finish my book, but now I don’t even remember what book it was. While Ms. Kiner was working with the bass’s, I was deeply enveloped in my book.

“Maddie!” Ms. Kiner yelled in the middle of teaching the other section. “What are you doing?”
“Reading.” I responded without even looking up from my book. All eyes were on me but I was so fed up with Ms. Kiner at this point that I didn’t really care.
“Put your book away right now or I’ll return it to the library.” She said this with such a smug expression, as if she thought she had surely won the argument. I looked up from my book and said, “No you won’t. This is my own book so actually, it can’t be returned to the library.”

Ms. Kiner looked quite shocked and upset that she didn’t have the upper hand. She gave me a glare, like she usually did to the students that she knew she didn’t have absolute control over, and continued to teach the other sections. That was the only time I ever talked back to a teacher.

I was relieved when the year was over, as were all of my other classmates. We had a lot of good times that year making fun of our teacher and my friends and I from my old school still make jokes to each other about her class. This was my first bad experience with music, and thankfully I haven’t had any other experiences like it, but Ms. Kiners awful class made me further appreciate the teachers that I had in years past. This also made me look forward to my future choir classes because I realized that I could never, ever, have a choir class as bad as that one again.