Lawyer Reaches Verdict: I’d Rather Teach Music

The students are singing, but one girl picks her fingernail and another rocks restlessly.

It’s 36 hours before a concert choir performance at Springfield High School, and music teacher Dave Requa is peeved. “You have to decide why you’re here,” he chastises. “The group needs your whole self for this, top to bottom, inside and out.”

Requa dismisses the fidgety class, then smiles. The rehearsal wasn’t that bad, but he didn’t want the students to know.

He can scold the youngsters over their commitment because he has made his own commitment, and they know it: He gave up a 20-year career in law to be their teacher.

Requa had a practice, reputation and income--a jury awarded $535,000 in his last trial--then he walked away to earn $30,357. But he has a son in private college, a daughter in high school and a wife bringing home a similarly modest teacher’s salary who urges him on.

Why? “High school students will walk through fire to get what they want,” says Requa, 47. “They look like they don’t care. They look nonchalant. But if you show them something they want, they’ll do anything to get there. Then it’s not a matter of inspiration; it’s a matter of keeping up with them.”

He brings to teaching--a career he pursued before law--a lawyer’s analytical mind, a performer’s charm, his band-director father’s discipline and a bit of mystery.

“Some of the kids said, ‘Why is he dropping his law career to come teach us? That’s stupid,’ ” says graduating senior Colleen Gillespy, 17, who will study music education this fall. “But we were impressed by that, and we were willing to work for someone who would give up everything he’s known to work with us.”

Besides teaching students the standards and classical pieces, and dance for the top-flight, Requa offers them an understanding of music as expression, capable of unleashing many emotions.

He learned that early. He remembers trips to his grandmother’s Missouri home in a 1954 Ford. His parents and sister were doing what they always did--singing.

“I cried because I didn’t know the songs,” Requa says, crammed in his nook of an office, with a large desk and wingback chair saved from his law practice.

“My mother told me, ‘It’s OK. Just listen and you’ll learn the words.’ We got to where we were singing a cappella quartets in the car.”

Is that his sense of the community of music, the ideas he pounds into his 75 charges? “Do you have business that’s more important than the group?” he asks in his three classes when students horse around.

Such lessons are instructive as well for the larger community, to which Requa turns for support. After a too-fast turnover of teachers, he is rebuilding a music program that, until now, depended on admission fees and discretionary funds to cover annual costs of $10,000.

Rebuilding to Requa means creating spirit. In May he bought the first plaque to announce outstanding seniors in music and to honor a beloved 33-year colleague. He invited hundreds of alumni from the school’s premier singing group to perform, generating good feelings and a mailing list of donors.

It’s not unlike wooing a jury, Requa concedes. “As a lawyer, one of your functions is to educate the jury, teaching the physics of a car accident or the mechanics of a product case,” he says. “You’re an advocate. You’re playing the part of a salesman.”

In high school, Requa played saxophone, bassoon, oboe, clarinet, flute, bass guitar, piano . . . but wanted to be a trial lawyer. Yet he shifted in college and followed his father--”a Pied Piper of junior high kids”--into education. After leading school bands for two years, he again reversed himself, enrolling in law school for fear that a teacher’s salary couldn’t feed a family.

Requa’s booming practice in personal injury, workers’ compensation and school law led to nightly doses of antacids. Not even involvement in church choirs and community theater could ease a growing distaste. Legal arguments have gone from “reasonable and scholarly,” he says, to “personal attacks and a win-at-all-costs attitude.”

Forgive Requa’s students if they think this is precisely their teacher’s demeanor.

“He yells a lot, but he means well. He wants us to do well. That’s why he yells,” says sophomore Laura Dixon, 15, who credits Requa for improving her volume and ability to blend in a group. “I wasn’t sure I liked him at first.”

But Requa may be perfect for teaching adolescents, says local judge Roger Holmes, a drummer in big band combos and theater orchestras who presided over several of Requa’s cases.

“You have to be very blunt with your clients, telling them, ‘You have a lousy case’ or ‘You have a great case and you want to sell out for next to nothing,’ ” Holmes says. “Once kids get to the high school age, they know who’s being blunt and who’s blowing sunshine.”

Despite the bluster, Requa requires only one thing: hard work. This theory is his reality.

Even now, as he directs music for two summer community theater productions, he’s doing his own homework and contemplating classroom strategies for fall. One lesson he jokes about: Do not close a law practice while teaching full time.

Very full time. Consider his usual lunch break. He’s munching carrots when singer Heather Trammel pops into the music room. She wants to practice “Some Enchanted Evening” and is looking for a piano.

Requa drops the carrots: “I’d be happy to play it through.”