How To Write A Letter To A Church Choir: Fill & Download for Free

Roasted and toasted, actually.We had a physics professor at community college, my cousin and I. We had three semesters of physics with him.His attire was always the same:Turtleneck (he had every single color turtleneck).Bald, but curly white hair on the sides above his ears.Khaki pants (always gray or gray-biege).Crocs.Same watch, every single day.Safari hat (with a string that went under his chubby triple-chin).And his turtleneck was always tucked into his pants. He had a fairly big belly so it never made much sense to me why he did this. I always feel like I’m describing a cartoon character, but this man was definitely real.This professor had an extremely raspy voice. It was as if he had a belch with each breath, billowing through the air with his words.He opened every single semester the same way: Insulting everyone, yet, motivating them to actually learn the material. It was the most confusing educating I have ever had. Yet, I truly loved attending his classes.His semester opener:“I’m professor ______, I’ve been teaching at the college for around 30 years now. If you take a look at the syllabus, you’ll notice that my office hours are at room ___ between the hours of ___ and ___. In the last 30 years, I have never opened the door for my office hours. I plan to keep it that way.”He had this method of teaching where he would construct a dialogue with the class. He would conduct the lesson, leaving pauses for students to randomly answer. He thought this was a good way to keep the class engaged.On one Valentine’s day, the class was met with one of those pauses, and somebody answered something. I couldn’t remember what the lesson was.“No, you’re an idiot, that’s wrong” the professor said.The class began to laugh.Then, he continued with the corrected answer, and kept conducting the lesson the same way.Another pause, and a girl answers this time.“Wow, you’re wrong, too. You two are lucky, you must be made for each other” he said.Another uproar in the classroom. You see, despite his constant roasts, he was a decent professor. Despite the loneliness that was apparent in his character and his unhygienically strange Steve Jobs safari-look, he wanted people to learn. When he would roast anybody, even the person being roasted would laugh. If people wanted a letter of recommendation from him, he wrote it. Hell, he would ask you to write it and he would sign off on it.He went to Berkeley. He knew both me and my cousin were planning on going there. When he discovered that, he told us:“You guys are idiots. You’re making a mistake. Nobody in Berkeley cares about you. You could be sleeping with someone from your class and they still wouldn’t help you with your homework. The only A I ever got at Berkeley was in Choir.”We didn’t listen to him.We both received A’s for all three semesters of physics with him.One distinct memory I often think back to was in lab. He had a habit of instructing the class about the lab in the beginning. If you came around 5 minutes late, the doors were locked and you weren’t allowed to be a part of the lab. That didn’t mean you got a zero, it just meant you weren’t going to learn.He would go over all the things we needed in the lab, the tools, the procedures, the calculations—then, we were to form groups and spend the next three hours doing the work ourselves.After that brief explanation, the professor would go to a corner of the room and sit down in his turtleneck, take his hat off, and pull a Walkman out. Yes, one of these:Headphones that looked like that, too. The cd player in this photo might be too generous.It turns out our professor was actually a part of a church choir. He sang. During lab, he would spend those three hours listening to music.One time, our third lab partner, not my cousin or myself, needed a question answered. The rules were always to leave the professor alone after he explains. He will not answer anything if you didn’t ask the question at the beginning of class.Our friend keeps yelling the professor’s name, but the professor begins to press down on the headphones against his ears, attempting to mute our friend. Our friend keeps asking him his question, and the professor flips him the bird.In the middle of lab.Again, everybody laughs. Even our friend laughed.At the end of class, we all go to him to ask our question, and the professor pointed out why our friend was an idiot. He pointed to something in the lab for clarity. It was actually very obvious.He would frequently go over our physics textbook and make fun of our author for putting pictures of mountains on random pages with statistics. He would say, “If you find yourself interested in the heights of strange mountains, turn to page ___.”I distinctly remember him telling the class that we shouldn’t go Googling for the answers. That, if we wanted to search for something, try the problem first, and struggle. If you can’t figure it out, reach out to stuff online as a last resort.Except, he never said anything quite so nicely. He always had a flair to make it his own.Our last semester with him was the last semester he was going to teach. He was to retire after us. A group of our classmates pitched in to grab him a nice bottle of whiskey, which actually made him smile for the first time. He offered to go to a bar to have drinks with some of the group. I didn’t go, but, from what I heard, he wasn’t the mean man he portrayed for the near two years that I knew him. He actually had an extremely successful brother, who only cared about money. He chose to teach because he truly loves the material. That part was always obvious to me. He had plans to continue singing. The last I heard is that he was picking up gardening.I think about him from time to time. He was probably one of the truest professors I ever had. He left an impression I’ll never forget—that it’s important to always remember, despite how much you learn and how far you go, that you’re forever an idiot.He still makes me laugh in memory.There was something about the way he roasted us that was humbling; where we knew he had no ill-will toward us.I found a picture someone in my class had turned into a meme.

A long time ago, I didn’t used to let them in, but one hot summer day, I invited one African American Jehovah’s witness man—I’ll call him “Roy”—in so that he could sit and have a drink of water before he went on his way. We talked for a while, he told me about his church and their beliefs. I learned he was a UNIX instructor at the local university, that he and his wife had belonged to a Baptist church, and that they had after a while decided to join the Jehovah’s Witness church.Roy would come around with other JW folks, and we’d chat. He got to know us and our son, and we got to know him. We discovered over the decades that he used to play organ and used to accompany Aretha Franklin and her gospel choir back in the day. Later, when President Obama was elected, he proudly told us that one of his daughters was working in the President’s administration. When my husband and I went to live in Germany for about a year, and had our college-graduate son housesitting for us, Roy would continue visiting, drop off his pamphlets and chat with our son…and I am pretty sure Roy was looking out for our son, just in case.Over the years, my husband and I would look forward to Roy’s visits, so that we could chat for a while, catch up with what was going on with him. We never did join the Jehovah’s Witness, because we had our own church that we go to, but we really respected this man, his intelligence, his devotion, and his neighborliness.He was older than us, and started getting Parkinson’s. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him, and we don’t expect to see him during this pandemic shutdown.Honestly, he was the most interesting, compassionate, NICE Jehovah’s Witness I’ve ever met. We miss him terribly, and I’m going to write a letter to his church to see if there’s some way we can write to him and see how he’s doing.So I would say, regardless of whether you’re into religion or not, take some time to get to know them. It’s worth it.

If you haven’t had a Criminal Background Investigation (CBI), get one.Then, write a letter introducing yourself and listing your credentials and experience. Include information about where to check for the results of your CBI. Don’t forget your contact information. (If you have a humorous message on your voice mail, change it to something more professional.)Do not mention your fees. Discuss this when potential students contact you.Send this letter to every high school and middle school choir director, and also to all the church choir directors in your area.If a church does not have a choir director, send the letter to the pastor/priest/rabbi. You might get hired as a church music director. Of course, if this happens, you cannot charge the members of your choir for their lessons, but you can also insist in your contract that you be allowed to use the church and its instruments for teaching your other students. Don’t worry about asking this—it is standard procedure.Wait for the calls to come in. I hope you have a day job because in your business, it takes a long time to make enough money to live on.