Longtime Triton Choir director retires

It was a bittersweet graduation ceremony for Triton Choir Director Craig Anderson last month.

Anderson conducted the Triton High School Choir for the final time as he retired after 41 years of teaching, 39 of those years in Dodge County.

Anderson grew up in northern Minnesota and attended Bethel College. After graduating from Bethel he taught in western Minnesota for two years before accepting a position in the Claremont schools.

When he started teaching in Claremont, Anderson said, he expected he would only stay for a couple of years, get some experience and go back to northern Minnesota.

Things did not work out that way as “Claremont was good to me” and he stayed there until 1991 when Claremont, Dodge Center and West Concord joined to together to form the Triton School District.

In the new Triton district, at first, he taught in the high school and Claremont Elementary and then in the Middle School in West Concord. He then began to teach exclusively in the high school and is the only choir director that Triton High School has had.

It is nice, he added, to now have all the students in the district in one place in Dodge Center.

In his 40-plus years of teaching, Anderson said, the students have not changed as much as the issues and technology.

“I don’t know if the kids have changed, but the issues have changed,” he said.

Through all those years, he said, the biggest challenge has come in the past several years because of the COVID pandemic.

COVID had the students at home, doing e-learning through ZOOM. That was something no one thought of when he first began teaching.

While teaching all subjects through distance learning is a challenge, teaching music and directing a choir had its own special issues.

“There’s no substitute to being in a room together singing,” Anderson said. “You don’t have the synergy of being together.”

Whether it is playing an instrument or singing you have to listen to those around you and adjust, he said. It’s not the same, he said, trying to sing by yourself with headphones as students were doing in the spring of 2019 when schools were completely shut down.

His choir students could usually tell from his face how a song was going, he said. He also could not play the piano while the student was singing along from home because of the time delay.

By the next school year, things were a little better, he said, although the distancing and hybrid in-school and at-home learning still made it difficult. This year (the 2021-22 school year) has “pretty much been back to normal.

Still, the Music Department survived the pandemic and although numbers were down some during the just completed school year they were not way down, he said.

“Our administration, I feel, is real supportive of the arts,” Anderson added.

Anderson said he is one of the last original Triton teachers to be retiring.

For his last year of teaching, he said, “I’m doing all my favorite songs.”

Anderson said he is retiring this year because he said he would retire when his daughter Christina graduated from Triton High School. He had originally thought he would retire when daughter Olivia graduated in 2019 but was talked out of that idea.

Asked before graduation how he thought he would feel when the time came, he said he thought the two times the reality of it would hit him would be when he walked out of the school after graduation and next fall “when school starts without me.”

Asked what he would do next, he said, “I don’t know.” His wife, Deb, he added is still teaching in Byron. He also is involved in the music programs at his church in West Concord but said he would be taking a few months off from those duties.

The family’s immediate plans, he said, include renting an RV and “hitting Route 66.”