Chorus teachers: Again, please, with feeling...

In my previous post, "One priority of a good chorus teacher," I discussed what made one particular chorus teacher effective.  If you go that route, however, and lead the class in singing, remember not to drain the life out of the song.  My sixth grade chorus teacher was good at avoiding this.  Another chorus teacher that year wasn't as successful at this, at least on one afternoon that I remember.  As I waited to walk home with a friend after school, I heard this teacher's class rehearsing Melissa Manchester's "You Should Hear How She Talks About You."  The teacher pounded the song out robotically on the piano while singing in a voice almost completely devoid of feeling, "You should hear how she talks about you; you should hear what she says..."  I wish I'd heard her students perform it in concert; if they sang it the way she did that afternoon, the end result would have had about as much heartfelt passion as a tax audit.