Rethinking Genius

I work with young children all the time.  Part of what goes into successfully teaching kids is being able to relate to them.  This doesn't mean you have to become best friends or anything.  But you should feel comfortable talking to them.  A student comfortable with their private music teacher will be more receptive to learning. I think one of my best teaching secrets when it comes to relating to young children is allowing myself to revert to my inner child.  Everyone has one deep down.   This doesn't mean behaving like a child .  Far from it.  But it does mean allowing myself to remember what was fun for me when I was young. I'm always walking through toy stores.  The main reason is to keep an eye out for any fun teaching supplies I could use in the lesson.  But it's also a great time to tap into that inner child.  When I'm walking through I let myself revert to "little kid" mentality.  What was it that made a to...

Let's talk about "the week."  The week is a very different concept from "a day."  It boils down to this: the week is planned, a day is not. The concept of a day is finite and irregular.  A day activity is something spur-the-moment.  You know vaguely that you will eat meals.  Maybe some of the meals are planned, maybe some are not.  What you ate "that day" may be different from what you ate the day before.  Maybe something came up at the last minute that made you change your mind about dinner plans. Day activities are flexible and changing. The week is your schedule.  Certain things like work or school must be planned by the week.  You work from 9-5 Monday through Friday so you plan around that.  Weekly activities are not spur-the-moment.  Weekly classes, for example, are something that you are paying for so other less important activities move around this weekly class. Weekly activities are regularly occurring and ...

....Or the art of sound. This is something I tell my students or the parents of my students and they always give me this look like I just said something really revolutionary.  I don't know how/why it happened but somewhere along the way music got separated from the other arts. It's strange.  People see music as an art but they don't necessarily think of music falling in the same category as painting or sculpting.  But it is an art.  It's just as much of an artistic expression as a painting.  The difference is in which sense is being stimulated.  Painting is a visual art.  Music is auditory. And just like any other art form you must study the masters.  This means listening to other artists perform your pieces.  The Suzuki Method has become famous (for better or worse) for making children listen to their pieces.  Unending discussions have arisen about teaching students to play by ear and whether this "Suzuki" approach is really all ...

Technique is a subject musicians will constantly obsess over. If the player is a beginner he worries about making unappealing noises. If the player is advanced, he will work on adjusting here or moving there in order to achieve the best possible sound. When working on technique, musicians generally focus on the sound coming out of their instrument and the immediate body part connected with the sound they wish to improve (such as the motion of the bow hand). However, the body is not a collection of separate parts. Rather, it is a complete “package” which must be addressed as a whole in order for the player to truly improve. There are many different schools of thought on how a string instrument should be played. The purpose of this booklet is to give the musician a brief overview of their body and how it “performs” so that injury can be prevented and technique sharpened. You can find this manual on Amazon , Barnes and Noble and most other major e-book stores.

This post is for all the parents that are thinking about starting their young child in music lessons. Music is a HUGE commitment.  Teaching music is my career and I will be the first to admit that leaning to play an instrument well is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. Many parents, with good reason, like the idea of giving their child the gift of music.  As a field of study it helps develop areas of the brain that regular school subjects will not.  It opens up the possibilities of new social circles and opportunities (scholarships, tours abroad, etc...).  Plus it's a pastime anyone can enjoy no matter how old. But there's a reason why only a small percentage of people play a musical instrument proficiently.  In fact, there are several reasons.  These are basic reality facts: Instruments cost money.  Your child will have to have multiple instruments throughout their music career as they grow both in size and ability.  Instrum...

I've yet to find a book that introduces sight reading as smoothly as this book.  Do keep in mind that this book is designed for the student that knows nothing  about reading notes.  A student that knows beginner level basics might not find the material to be challenging enough. "I Can Read" separates pitch reading from rhythm reading which is absolutely brilliant since they really are two completely different skill sets.  This separation of skills makes this sight reading book perfect in the Suzuki Method setting but could really be used with any teaching approach. Because the concepts are so simple, there's a high probability that any at-home sight reading assignments will be done correctly.  This is advantageous when the student is young and the parent is not musical themselves.  The less confusion, the better. This book is definitely worth checking out if you teach beginner students of any age.

I never quite outgrew watching cartoons.  It's not like I get up every Saturday at 7am to watch them like  I did back in the good ol' days.  But I rent series on Netflix on a pretty regular basis.   Good  cartoons can have very provoking plot lines and interesting characters.  "Avatar: The Last Airbender" being an excellent example. One of the lastest series I've been going through is "Star Wars: The Clone Wars."  At the beginning of every episode they have what one of my students calls "a Yodaism" (we bond over the episodes we've seen).  It's a little one or two sentence bit of wisdom/life advice that usually has something to do with the episode that will follow. So one one of the episodes I recently watched it said: "Adaption is the key to survival."  It struck me as really relavant to a topic that has been coming up a lot lately in lessons.  I currently have this large batch of students that have "stuck it out....