When we walked in the door, we had to find our seats and be prepared to sing.
Ms. Sandefur meant business, but she could also be a lot of fun.
She was the chorus teacher at Gainesville High School and my favorite teacher of all time.
Ms Sandefur believed that if you challenged kids enough, if you encouraged students to be more than they thought they could be, if you set a goal out before them…..they might just reach it. She never settled for second best out of her students. And believe me, she knew when we weren’t giving it our best. She had a way of just looking at us, without yelling or fussing, but a look that said “you can do more than that, right? you can sing that part a little better, you didn’t really put your best effort into that, did you?”
She believed that I could be a junior director. She encouraged me to learn the music, to really study it and then to get up in front of the students and direct them. Me…..in front of my peers…..holding this little stick and trying to get them to all sing, together! She believed in me, way more than I believed in myself.
She paired me up with Mindy to sing a duet at a competition. Mindy was like this awesome alto singer! I thought Mindy was one of the coolest girls in chorus! I couldn’t believe I was going to get to sing with her. We learned a couple of songs, one of them was a song straight from the book of Psalms called “Lift Thine Eyes”….and went something like…”lift thine eyes, oh, lift thine eyes to the mountains, whence comest, whence comest, whence comest thine help.” It was the coolest duet song and Mindy and I ended up winning superior ribbons.
Once during class, Ms. Sandefur was trying to teach the students about how to ”approach a note” straight on. When you were singing it, you shouldn’t come up under the note, or come down onto the note….hit it straight on. She said she would give us an example. Then she looked at me, asked me to stand up and sing an A for the class. She played the note on the piano for me, i tried to not think too hard about what i was doing and just sing. But the fact that she believed I could do it, made me believe it too.
The two and a half years I had in that chorus room were the best ever. She signed my yearbook when I graduated, and I will cherish that forever.
