I’ve been thinking a lot about how my view of myself as a teacher has shifted over the last 15+ years. When I first started teaching I was a high school student myself, helping my own teacher. I worked with brand new students and younger students as a practice partner, a strings camp teaching assistant, a studio class assistant and a group class junior leader. I will forever be grateful to that teacher for giving me the chance to try teaching. She saw the potential in me and let me go for it in a structured way where I could fail gently.

Eventually, I ran my own “intro to violin” camp based on the one I had done with my teacher. That led to my own group classes, leading the church orchestra and my own private students. I was hooked. During my undergraduate studies I learned about pedagogy  by reading, interviewing faculty, and synthesizing everything into a capstone project. I followed that by getting a viola performance and violin/viola pedagogy master’s degree with more reading, teaching, feedback on my lessons, weekly teaching seminars, etc. All this to say that I’ve read a lot about how other people teach!

So what does this have to do with anything? I still observe other teachers teaching! I’m still trying to be a better teacher than the one I was yesterday. Most importantly, I still hold to the idea I learned early on in my teaching career – “Every child can be developed” by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki. Every child, every person, CAN play the violin or viola. How well, for how long, and whether it looks like it’s “supposed to” is a different matter entirely. So why talk about what’s changed? Because it sounds on paper like nothing has!

But here’s the thing: how I think about MYSELF as the teacher has radically changed. I used to see my role as the teacher as being the person with the answers, the technique and who knew what they were doing (at least more than my students did.) I thought I was there to impart skill and general “goodness” through necessary musical skills, a la “beautiful tone, beautiful heart.”

I don’t think that way anymore. Now I see my job as being a guide. I tell my students that “My goal is to work myself out of this job.” I want all my students to have a greater awareness of themselves mentally, physically and emotionally. That’s not to say that I’ve thrown technique or standard repertoire out the window! I think having good technique is what allows us to more effectively express ourselves and create the sounds we dream about. But my students won’t have me forever and I want them to be ready to be their own teachers.

Now I’m less interested in reading about how to effectively teach vibrato and more interested in reading about how to understand my own emotions. I’m more concerned with equipping my students with the skills to solve problems on their own than I am about whether or not they perform perfectly. I’m not sure what I am now, other than someone a little further on the way of self discovery. If you find yourself in a similar place, what do you call yourself? Let me know!