If we band teachers are honest with ourselves, we suffer when we lose a student. Losing a student is like losing a friend. It hurts, and the pain lasts. I still vividly recall many of my quitters, even from years ago.

We may pretend that it’s not a big deal, that students come and go, but it’s not so. But why should it hurt so much?

First, I think it’s that we are sad to lose all the work we’ve put into the student. A tremendous and somewhat indescribable effort goes into teaching a young person how to play an instrument, a million details and constant reinforcement. We’ve spent years working with a student, rolling a heavy granite boulder up a hill, only to see it go cascading down the mountain again.

When I taught high school English I wasn’t bothered when one of my students left my class. Transferring from one English class to another, a student will continue to learn the subject and may in fact benefit from having a new perspective on the subject.

But because a school usually has only one band teacher, a student who leaves band is not leaving the class, but leaving the subject. Thus, in a spasm of adolescent desire for change, ends a student’s education in music at the ripe age of 12. As they leave, my quitters almost always assure me they’ll come back—maybe next year, maybe in high school— but in more than 20 years I’ve never had a quitter who returned. Once they pack their bags and check out, they don’t come back.

For years, I taught private lessons at a local music school and had many adult students, some who had played as children and quit and others who had never studied an instrument before meeting me. Those who never had lessons as children always seemed so amazingly eager to learn, despite the substantial obstacles they faced. They were happy just to have the opportunity that they missed as children, and II’d often hear from them something like, “I wish I’d had the chance to learn an instrument when I was a kid, but we didn’t have the money and there wasn’t any band program in my school.”

From the comeback students—those who had played as children and quit— I also saw the same eagerness, but there was something else too: regret. There were many variations in their stories, but all were wrapped in regret at having quit as children. I’ve heard this story of regret so often over the years that I could write a gospel of regret. To borrow from Paul Simon, there were 50 ways to leave your band program, but they all ended in regret. Of course, the regret , as it often does, takes years to catch up to us. I’ve heard all these variations on the theme:

—I quit playing the clarinet when I was 11. I’m not really sure why. Just seemed like the thing to do at the time and no one tried to stop me.

—I quit playing the flute in middle school because the teacher didn’t pay enough attention to me. At time I wanted to be the center of attention.

—I quit playing trumpet in high school because I thought football was more important and there wasn’t time for both.

—I convinced my parents that I didn’t like it, but the truth is I didn’t want to work hard at that age.

—I quit because my friends were quitting.

Whatever the reason, all my come-back adults told me the same sad refrain: I wish I hadn’t quit. I wish that someone had pushed me to stay with it, but no one did. We never take advice until it’s too late to use the advice.