How to Unlock Your Teacher's Super Powers

Yes, your teacher has super powers. They are hidden, and you the student hold the key.

I am thrilled to have this article included in the latest edition of the American Suzuki Journal, and they have seen fit to put it up on their website this week. It is a special message for students and their parents, and absolutely just as much for those outside the Suzuki world as for those within.

If you want, you can tag your favorite superhero teacher on the Suzuki Association of the Americas Facebook page, here.

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Update: May/June

I am honored to have had two pieces published recently: an article in the American Suzuki Journal, and a poem in Rock & Sling (Issue 12.1.) 

It was a special treat to see my article in the ASJ featured on the mailing label that came with the journal--I am rather proud of that. The article, "Walk the Hills, Crawl if Necessary" was something I worked on for months this past year. The basic point was that as parents we run into times when we have to loosen our grip on our expectations, that sometimes what looks like stagnation is still a moving-forward, just maybe hidden, or very slow. It ended up being very, very close to home, and depending on the day (week/month) it was sometimes nearly impossible to write about.

The poem in Rock & Sling was also difficult to write. "The Beatitudes" by Vladimir Martynov, Rescored for Kronos Quartet was a piece I nearly gave up on. It began as an assignment at a poetry workshop I attended in 2015, the last assignment at the end of an incredibly full, intense week. I hated what I had written so much I decided not to turn it in. In the end I could not leave it alone, either, but it took many months to shift into its current form.

Today's theme? Never give up. Time is kind of a magical thing, and I keep forgetting to factor it in. 

I have been working on several projects while away from this blog. Day-to-day what I see around me is Mess, but over the course of time I can see that I am making progress. In time I hope to share about those here. In the meantime you can find me a little more frequently on Instagram.

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"That Hard Passage," ASJ

Last fall my friend Sarah asked me to share what I had carried with me into adulthood from my childhood Suzuki training. There are many things--part of what I love about teaching is that it keeps showing me more about not only my own musical training, but my whole upbringing, deeply informed as it was by Shinichi Suzuki's teachings and philosophies. But this answer, what I am starting to think of as the discipline of beauty, is the one closest to my heart. I think it transcends the Suzuki philosophy, actually, to all of music and art, but this is where I encountered it in my own life. I am thankful to the American Suzuki Journal for giving me the chance to share my essay, "That Hard Passage," with a larger audience, both in their most recent volume (44.3) and here on their website.

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(This is not about violin--

but most of what we are doing during lessons and classes is not actually about violin.)

Recently one of my 3rd graders caught a glimpse of the top of my head while I was tuning her violin.

"Your hair is turning white!"

"Yes, it is! That's okay. I actually kind of like it."

She nodded. 

"I guess I'm getting older and changing, just like you are." It was really only as I said these words that I realized how true they were. Had I known this, before it came up? 

I cannot tell you how often something like this happens. It seems like it would be enough, just learning a skill like how to play an instrument. But there is always so much more going on. The focus is violin. We work pretty hard on that. But what it is about lies always just below the surface of what we do every day, and sometimes rises above, glimmering. I love these moments more than words can say.

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Light, 12/3/15:

Today's light: what these kids can do.

Light, 12/2/15:

Today's light: honestly, today was dark. I caught the news in between private students and Violin Project, and all I could think on my way to the school was, I am going to go spread light now, because it is the only thing I can do. And I saw Oldest walking through the park on his way home, and I got to class and saw the faces of my students and the volunteers who help me and friends who teach at the school and Middle and Youngest because they wait for me after school and Oh, this work drains me but all those faces connected to all those souls--they were the real light.





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Questions, Answers

Last week I wrote some, practiced some, organized some. I did lots of normal everyday stuff and also cleaned my office (definitely not normal-everyday.) The whole week, frost flowers climbed across my office window, advancing and receding without my really noticing the movement. Just every once in a while—hey, look at that! and later—gone.

Also last week, from A.Word.A.Day, this: There are years that ask questions and years that answer. –Zora Neale Hurston

I’m so glad that’s true.

I had been suspecting it, wondering on some level. Because what a relief. If entire years can ask and answer questions then that allows for time—long stretches of it—and all the other things that move slowly and profoundly but only while you aren’t looking. Like the frost on my window.

*     *     *

Friday afternoon, as we worked our way through a bitter windy parking lot after violin, Oldest and Middle expounded on the future of technology. The things they talked about teetered on the brink of science fiction: information uploaded directly into our brains, easy learning, instant knowledge. I had to ask: So is being able to carry or transfer information the same as knowing something? I think they thought I was trying to be argumentative, but I wasn’t. I spend hours a day trying to move people from understanding, to ability, to something that is a deep abiding part of their being. Besides effort and process, the thing that seems to matter the most in this progression is time.

*     *     *

Whole years of questions = whole years of discomfort, true. But the softness of not-knowing is there, too. Have you ever run into the hard brick wall of someone else’s Knowing? I think I prefer softness. That slow slow motion and growth. Because it must be here in the question years that compassion grows, and humility, and humanity.

The years that answer—they are like breathing pure oxygen. Peaceful, whole. Welcome. And yet they probably hold as much potential for danger as the question years. A person could get stuck there. The questions and answers need each other desperately, and as much as I hate to admit it I need them both.

These are things I maybe have not wanted to accept: the necessity of the question years, the long periods of time that answers and understanding require, the waiting. But the idea of slow things, of softness and knowing and Time, of a cycle of questions and answers that does not ever have to tire out—there are promises there. They make me want to promise to keep watch.

Frost flowers creep

across the window—

seen, not seen.

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Thankful, 2014: A Chance to Watch

1. At my students’ fall recital, sitting finally—momentarily—watching and listening. These milestones—you hit them whether you feel ready or not, whether you are sick or healthy, regardless of what else is happening in your life. We work for mastery. We work to capture the spirit of the piece. But what is on display in front of us is always deeper than those things, broader than the performance.

 So many dramas at play, and most of it hidden.

My pride in my students, and the fact that I am on the edge of my seat for each person who walks to the front of the church and bows and plays and bows again has everything to do with knowing them. Their stories, their struggles, their triumphs. Working with them I have gotten glimpses of these things, and I promise you even Twinkle is never the same piece twice.

2. Sitting with the pit band on the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof. Technically my first high school musical, if you don’t count the All-City Opera production of “The Magic Flute” I played in ninth grade. It is an odd and beautiful experience at 42, and I can’t get enough of watching. 

I am here to play, but my heart is with Oldest, on stage. Stage fright for the people you love is almost worse than stage fright for yourself, and it has nothing to do with your confidence in your loved ones or their abilities. As we start playing “To Life” the only thing tempering the adrenaline is the fact that I am used to playing despite it. Besides, I have to focus on what I am doing. 

And then it is his solo, and he is standing on a bench, hand raised in blessing—hand with new angles, and handsome—nailing it:

Za vasle zdorovie

Heaven bless you both, Na zdrovie

To your health, and may we live together in peace!

I get to watch, and I get to be part of the music—his music. My pride in him, the fact that I am on the edge of my seat—you know what that is. I have been watching him since what must be the beginning of time, and the story is rich and complex and I know I will never grasp all of it.

But I get to watch.

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Violins!

Wednesday I brought the new violins to class, and the rest of the week was an even more pronounced mix of our usual brilliant moments and chaos. The anticipation building up to this week has been thick, and now that it has been released—oh. 

Wednesday pretty much everybody forgot about snack. They forgot to be squirrelly when we went to the bathroom. They were focused only on the violins, and for a certain amount of class I gave in to the noise and the spirit of discovery and watched them explore. My seasoned second year students helped the first year students, showing them how to put their shoulder rests on and how to tighten the bow, and then everyone just tried stuff. It was beautiful and loud, and I wish all of you could have witnessed it. The pictures, I think, tell the story well:

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Today is the Day

They have been waiting. And waiting. Practicing with box violins (mac and cheese boxes, stuffed with plastic bags and wrapped in turquoise duct tape, paint stirrers hot-glued in for necks) and dowel rod bows. They have been practicing, and singing and clapping and marching and dancing and listening. And waiting—mostly patiently but not always—for today.

It will feel different—the real violins are heavier, and not as easy to get in the right spot on your shoulder. Today will feel like a step backward because the playing positions and bow holds will not be as familiar as they were yesterday. I promised them the ease will come back, and will arrive much sooner than it did the first time around.

Everything will be more breakable now, and we've had a few accidents in class, already. We'll deal with that when we need to.

But—sound. We are so close to making sound, and learning notes, and putting real pieces together, bit by bit. We are going to make music together.

Today is huge.

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The Violin Project, Year 2: Notes from the First Day of Class

Seventeen is a big number. Seven returning students, ten new students. When I group them that way it all looks very manageable. All together they look like more than the sum of their parts. 

They were excited, yesterday, coming in. Eyes big. The new ones wanted to know when they would have violins. They are ready to play concertos. One child informed me, very seriously, “I’m doing violin because my mom said I had to.” One gave me five examples of How Fast A Learner I Am. We will move slowly, and that is hard but at the same time easier—so much less overwhelming than “Here’s your violin, this is how you hold it. Here’s your bow, this is how you hold it. Now play.” And I think we will have fun, regardless of how we ended up together in the first place.

I don’t know who was more nervous, the kids or I. For them I want to project calm and confidence, but every year is new, the territory fresh and a little wild, and every year I wonder if I am really up to this new year of teaching. I have trouble feeling calm.

And then we start, and everything’s okay.

We began yesterday with background music (Twinkle Theme and Variations) and coloring (treble clefs) and snacks, and worked our way into learning each others’ names, standing still, listening to and following instructions. The newcomers will be painting the fence, Karate Kid-style, for a while, and that tends to fly in the face of young peoples’ expectations. But it is like the scarf I have been knitting for months and months: day-to-day the progress is slow, and certainly not our culture’s usual way of acquiring things. But I got used to the slowness, and I enjoy the process. Recently—suddenly, it seemed—I noticed that the thing has length. Someday I will wear it and forget how long it took to make. Someday, suddenly, we will look at each other over our violins and say, “Look how much we’ve learned!”

Here’s what else I forget, and have to keep re-discovering: it’s not just every year that is new. Every day is new. Getting to know each other, fence-painting, problem-solving—we are in it together. What luck. I can’t wait.

For more about The Violin Project, click here, or visit our Facebook page.

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Sideways

Some stars disappear when you look at them straight on. Pale glints in your peripheral vision when you look up, they slide into blackness when you turn your eyes toward them. The issue is in our eyes: the cones concentrated in the central part of the cornea—the part we use when we look at something head-on—do not pick up the dim light that the rods around the edges of the cornea do. Regardless of the constancy of what we're looking at, we are stuck with what our eyes can see: stars-like-phantoms. They must be approached sideways, and gently.

It’s not just stars, though.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for months—the sideways-ness of things.

It is ever-present in teaching, especially so for me this past year, working with a small group of children every day. Threaded all through the process of learning violin are other things: how we treat one another, how we handle problems, how we respond to frustration. How we show love and respect and kindness. How we create and respond to beauty. How we learn to discipline our fingers, our ears, our mouths, our minds. How we simply learn one another and build relationships—complicated, real, and gritty.

This is why I find it hard to write about teaching. It is personal, ongoing, complex. It is also universal. The fact that I can focus on one thing—learning to play violin—is very helpful, because I can rule out Everything Else. Except I draw on Everything Else to do it—faith, psychology, physics, storytelling, eating Dorito’s—everything. And then of course it turns out that learning violin touches everything else. Try to nail the whole thing down, narrow it, look at it too directly, and you start to lose sight of certain things. Sometimes you have no choice but to approach sideways, gently.

It’s fair, I think, to start wondering which is the true art—the direct work or the sideways, the music or the people working on the music? It’s both things at once of course, but it’s worth considering what you might see when you shift your focus, and what is most important to you to see in the end. 

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What I'm Doing This Week

I’m not sure why I thought I’d get a lot of writing in this week. I am at the Chicago Suzuki Institute with my daughters, filling up on music and technique and new friends and Everything Violin. And—most importantly—reminding myself why we’re doing this in the first place (We are doing this in order to grow, in order to become better human beings. Music, you see, is the medium as much as it is the final product, the art, itself. And our lives—they are the true art.)

Those are noble words. The actual work they describe is awkward and messy and really stinking hard, but it is interspersed with these wonderful moments. Kind of like practicing violin, itself, which when done right is not at all romantic, but instead involves things like practicing the same two notes over and over until they can be played well, and then over and over many times more, until they will never sound ugly again. You don’t necessarily want to be in the room for this process, but the results are worth it. 

There has been music-making this week, and understanding, and beauty. 

We are enjoying ourselves and also bordering on wiped-out. In my characteristic, extremely relationship-oriented/extremely introverted way, I half want to absorb more/connect more/converse more, half want to hide somewhere with a book. One daughter, apparently, talks in her sleep. (“Mom,” a voice just informed me out of the dark of our dorm room, “there are two butterflies in here.”) And to be honest, our moments of beauty and understanding are balanced with healthy doses of snippiness.

Overall though, I feel like we have been able to relax more this year. I prepared myself ahead of time for the comparison game—not that I’m not tempted to play (I am) but I am also (mostly) able to see it for what it is. I resolved early on that frog catching/rescuing (they are tiny and everywhere, crossing the sidewalks like ants,) as well as extra desserts, would be part of our daily schedule along with practicing and brushing teeth. And—luxury of luxuries—I brought an air mattress with me this year. Sleeping on the floor won’t hurt. This is all very good.

This feeling that there’s so much here, that I can’t possibly process it all, that I also don’t want to stop trying to process it all—that must be a good sign. This too, I think, is why we are here.

More about our Suzuki institute and workshop experiences here.

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What I've Been Up To

(Besides taking pictures)

Teaching:

I find teaching a difficult thing to write about, but I daily feel my brain churning away at the mystery of it all. I start to feel a little lost when I take too long a break from it, and I feel consumed by it by the middle of each semester. I dream of having a secretary to handle the details—scheduling, snacks, fundraising. But the actual teaching part—being part of and witness to so many lives, so many struggles, so much growth—I am all at once thankful and stretched and puzzled and energized and drained. The Violin Project, especially, is intense—7 kids and several wonderful volunteers and I—we have spent many hours together. The time and work are turning into something special. (Much of our year together is in pictures on our Facebook page.)

Last week my students performed with our community string orchestra. Everybody worked hard, prepared well, played beautifully. 

Non-blog writing:

A couple of projects that have needed more than I’ve been able to give. It was good to give them more of my time, even though they are not yet finished. The bit of momentum behind them is encouraging.

On the blog:

There are a number of new titles on my Music Resources: Picture Books, Etc. page. There are so many good books out there. Let me know what I've missed!

Oh—and making stuff:

These are slow-moving projects but I refuse to give them up completely. At the very least they are good for the soul.

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Long-Awaited

Husband and Middle took a bunch of pictures on The Violin Project's first day with violins. I love the moments they captured. My favorites? My first answer is "all of them," but I especially love these, by Middle. (If you want to see more pictures, you can find them here.)

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8

Eight violins ready to meet their students. Don't they look magical?

Today is Day 38 of The Violin Project at Kirksville Primary School, and the first day the students will hold real violins. To say everybody is excited would be a huge understatement. They've been working hard learning to hold "box" violins and dowel-rod bows, learning rhythms, singing, marching, and yes, we have even drilled "standing still" and "not talking." They seem to especially love playing "Fix the Teacher's Bow Hold."

I've been teaching for a number of years, but the fact that children learn things always, always feels like a miracle to me. Not because I don't believe they are capable of amazing things, but because being witness to amazing things unfolding in front of you is no small thing.

Best kind of magic there is, I think. It is not an easy job. But I love that I get to do this.

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Sparks

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” William Butler Yeats

On our second day of meeting together one of my students at The Violin Project announced that he was "doing this" only because he really wanted to play guitar. I told him that was fine with me, and asked him what kind of guitar he wanted to play—rock? Country? Blues? Classical?

Rock.

The next day I showed all of them this while they ate their snack. Because while I have no intention of standing in the way of this boy's dream, I thought he should know that violins can rock, too.

I love classical music, and I love violin. Mostly, though, I just love music. I focus on classical and violin because that’s where my training was. It's what I know and do best. What I want my students to realize though, even at the very beginning, is that while I’m teaching them to do very specific things (stand still, listen carefully, hold the bow this way, put your violin on your shoulder like this, work on this particular piece of music next,) I am really only providing them with tools. Those tools mean freedom—to express, to explore, to create.

I won’t pretend to teach rock or blues or jazz or fiddling. But I absolutely want to help my students know and love the richness of their instrument. They should know that learning an excellent bow hold is deeply connected to what you can do with it once you’ve got it down.

So we’ve been watching/listening to music, all sorts, so the kids can get an idea of what can be done with a violin:

 

Bach Double Violin Concerto

Piazzolla, Verano Porteno

Paganini Caprice No. 24

Bach Partita in E Major, Preludio (animated)

"Quarter Chicken Dark," from The Goat Rodeo Sessions

 

You never know which sparks will ignite, or where.




 

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First Day

The box violins are ready, the bows are ready. Everything is packed, waiting by the door. I’ve read, and imagined, and planned.

 

This afternoon seven children and I are embarking on something of an adventure. Am I ready? That’s a tough question. This is an experiment—part dream, part doing-what-I-know-how-to-do, part emulating what has worked really well for others. All mixed-up into what I guess is my own, new, thing.

 

I worry about messing it up, boring the kids, going too slow, going too fast, revealing what a _______ I am to everybody who hasn’t already figured it out, disappointing people who encouraged me, disappointing people who donated money, disappointing parents, students, myself. I worry I will run out of material, overwhelm everybody, talk too much, feel too shy, act too weird, lose my nerve, fall flat on my face.

 

And then I remember: this isn’t just my thing. It’s our thing—mine, my students’, my family’s, the school’s, the community’s. And together, with care and listening and work, we can make something good.

 

Life is art. I believe that more every day.

 

(The Violin Project is on Facebook. Come visit.)

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10 Bits of (Suzuki Institute) Magic

1. "I'll try"
2.  Watching Middle chop in Fiddling class
3.  Work = fun
4.  Youngest's gusto-filled up-bow accents
5.  Fresh ways of seeing and hearing
6. Being together
7.  Music that makes you laugh out loud
8. Sitting in the middle of an orchestra fortissimo
9. "Devil Went Down to Georgia"
10. Friendships

Oh, and 11--because we can't forget the frogs.

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In Case We Forget Why We're Here

Important and wonderful as all the violining is this week, there's other fabulousness, as well. New friends, new experiences. And tadpoles. Lots of them. Tadpoles that have been turning into frogs, and seem to want to be found and held and named. Their importance is not be underestimated; visiting them has become part of our routine this week.

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