A 17-year veteran of Haddonfield Memorial High School has called it a career.
A teacher there since 2009, Christopher Janney retired at the end of the school year. He began his time in the borough district as a substitute in 1987, right after graduating with a bachelor’s in music education. A year after that, he began an eight-year stint in the Camden School District, followed by 13 years in Westampton beginning in 1996.
In the time he’s been teaching, Janney has noticed students don’t always give their full attention.
“As a result of which, the attention spans of kids is just much much different, much less, than it was in 2009, and exponentially less than 1987,” he said. “The working vernacular, everyday language, of a high-school student in the 1950s was about 30,000 words. Today it’s less than (11,000).
“Gives you an idea.”
“I’d like to slow down a little bit and maybe pursue some musical endeavors without the full-time stress and stuff like that …” Christopher Janney acknowledged.
In his time at Haddonfield High, Janney has taught band, strings, jazz band, marching band, music theory, music recording and engineering, indoor drumlines and general music appreciation, and ran middle-school musicals.
While Janney had personal reasons for retiring, he also wants to redirect his life.
“I’d like to slow down a little bit and maybe pursue some musical endeavors without the full-time stress and stuff like that …” he acknowledged. “I’d like to maybe volunteer at Cathedral Kitchen in Camden maybe once a week. I would like to do some private teaching at some point.
“But first, I just need to do a reset and just think through everything.”
Trophies that Christopher Janney and other music teachers have collected at Haddonfield Memorial High.
Janney says that since he got to the high school, he seen more and more students focusing on quantity over quality. He believes that’s due to colleges wanting students with more experiences instead of higher grades.
“Now, the student wants to do a year of this a year of this, this club that club,” he noted. “They do everything a little bit because it builds their resume. But they do very little indepth-ly, because they’re trying to build their future. And you see that today. You see kids will do a little bit of everything, then they move on.
“What happens is you never really know the joy of immersing yourself.”
Teaching music has not always been easy for Janney either.
“The approach is, ‘But I can’t play it … ‘I tried it, I can’t,'” he recalled, and Janney usually responds that everything can’t be learned in one day.
“It’s going to take time,” he tells them. “And some kids get that. They grab it and then they work at it and then they improve and they see it. Others, they try it – done. But that’s how they learn.”
But despite the students who pursue too many activities at the expense of grades, Janney said he’s seen recently that things are swinging back.
“Colleges are starting to focus a little less on the activities and more on academics,” he explained, “because they’re realizing that they’re getting kids who are very well rounded in their experience, but they can’t conjugate a verb. They don’t have the basics.”
Janney also discussed other areas where he believes today’s students are different than when he started teaching, and even when he was a student.
“I think that 25 years ago, if I were to try to take a group of kids to see an opera, they would be bored in about five minutes,” he pointed out. “I think there would be a group of kids, not a large group, but you could probably take into the city to see an opera. And they would really enjoy it. Or the orchestra.
“I think there is a deeper appreciation for different areas of the arts.”
But despite the challenges, Janney admits he’ll miss the students, his colleagues and teaching itself.
“Teaching is high energy, it’s stressful, it’s frustrating, it’s thankless and it’s fun,” he related. “All in one. And at the end of the day, at the end of a career, I look back and I say, you know what? Darned if I didn’t love every minute of it. Even the moments when I was pulling out my hair. Teaching is a lot of fun, if you do it right.
“It’s a lot of fun.”
Since announcing his retirement, Janney has heard kind words from parents, students and staff. He got the principal’s varsity letter and has attended dinners in his honor with the art and music departments. And he knows someone will always take his place and continue to mentor new groups of students.
“If everything goes the way it should go,” he remarked, “two years from now – when I have pretty much moved on – there’ll be someone else in place with lots of energy and confidence and positivity that will be doing great things. And I will then fade away and that person will be the mainstay, and that’s the way it needs to be.”
