The Final Countdown....

Getting excited to have this internship over. It's been a really interesting and enlightening experience but also, I am excited to be done!

For this week, I will just leave you with some pictures and a few words about teaching music. Here is me, teaching the First Year class how to play the Autoharp. 

  

A note about the purpose of the Autoharp:

     So the First Year is designed to prepare for the students to being playing the piano in their second year. The kids are way to immature and young to actually start with keyboards, so they ease into it with tone bells (basically just a little xylophone, and the autoharp, which is an instrument I'd never heard of in my life until coming to Let's Play Music). The tone bells are for pitch and pitch relations and mirror the students' eventual progression to melodic playing on the piano. The autoharp is for harmonic rhythm, that is first getting in tune with chords (which are a huge part of the LPM program) and secondly, following the rhythm of the song. More important than the chords is playing something at the right time. To me this was a lesson for teaching my own piano students- that first the rhythm should be there, then the notes. It's easier to fix notes then rhythms. In my own teaching, I implemented this by using a metronome and clapping the rhythm of the melody, before even beginning to address the notes. I have one student, Ayva, who really struggles with rhythms but totally gets everything else, and I've noticed she got better after trying this technique (though the metronome is less desirable to actually counting as a teacher can re-start the count as the student adapts). That leads perfectly into my next discussion; teaching. 

As I've watched Lorie teach and have started teaching some of the classes myself, I realize that teachers turn on a new face, an energetic and engaged side of themselves that was certainly not there minutes before class started. When you get in front of kids, you would think it would be easy. And it is. But a lot goes into making the class flow smoothly. You have to memorize lesson plans and be prepared for any thing that goes awry. I've taught now in about 6 of her classes, and all but one I felt really good about. The one time I feel I messed up was when I didn't jump right in, and lacked energy. If you get into it enough, these kids will never know the difference. Fake it til you make it, as I say. That's teaching for you.