I started teaching in 1973. For my birthday in 1974 a friend of mine gave me a guitar. I knew some basic chords that I had learned when I was a teenager and this new guitar inspired me to sing folksongs and incorporate them into my teaching. Granted the students (6th graders) that I was teaching were not going to be impressed with the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, but they did get into songs like “This Land is Your Land”, “The Titanic”, “Ballad of Jesse James”, and “Battle of New Orleans”. The summer of my third year of teaching a fellow teacher, Jerry Silverstein, took me to the Philadelphia Folk Festival for the first time, and I was introduced to a whole new set of tunes to use in class. Singing with kids became an important part of my teaching. I continued singing throughout my career.