I love to teach. Here's why.
As an educator, I have two principal objectives for my students: autonomy and passion. I want them to gain not only abilities and knowledge, but also the confidence and inherent desire to continue growing and exploring on their own. The first step in this process is to learn to speak the musical language in a natural way by constantly experiencing it and interacting with it on every level (mental, emotional, and physical). I encourage my students to be aware of music’s presence in their lives, and to integrate musical thought into their habits and daily processes. This teaches them to become better listeners, becoming more strongly attuned to both themselves and those around them. Once my students develop real listening abilities, not only can they can much more easily perform particular techniques, they are also able to abstractly analyze musical concepts. This means they become more natural performers who can communicate with honesty from the instrument, rather than developing a style of playing that amounts to little more than artistic mimicry. I work very hard in each class or lesson to ensure that my students can both hear and physically reproduce the concept I am trying to teach with complete fluency, and sometimes this happens before they must understand the theoretical terminology. I believe that a holistic and personal understanding of new ideas allows my students to become active problem solvers who are independently motivated to engage with the subject matter.
I teach music because I believe that everyone possesses musicality as an inherent part of being human, and I want to help people access that part of themselves. Musical expression utilizes an essential aspect of our communicative abilities, one often unreachable via any other medium. I also feel passionately that music ought to take a central role in our modern world, and that I as a music educator have an obligation to nurture the creation of a more musical society. Resultantly, I urge my students to discover music’s universality as a language; I want them to find that music allows us to express our worth as individuals no matter who is listening, and also that musical performance can help us to assert our own brotherhood with humanity. I want my students to use music as a means of developing their own compassion – I want them to listen more carefully, both literally and in a more figurative sense of the word, so that they can achieve a heightened awareness of themselves, and of the world and of their unique places in it. By touching on the universality of the human experience, music encourages empathy between human beings, which is what helps to make this world a better place. Music has incredible capabilities, and I can only wish that music will become a necessary aspect of the proper education of every individual.
I teach music because I believe that everyone possesses musicality as an inherent part of being human, and I want to help people access that part of themselves. Musical expression utilizes an essential aspect of our communicative abilities, one often unreachable via any other medium. I also feel passionately that music ought to take a central role in our modern world, and that I as a music educator have an obligation to nurture the creation of a more musical society. Resultantly, I urge my students to discover music’s universality as a language; I want them to find that music allows us to express our worth as individuals no matter who is listening, and also that musical performance can help us to assert our own brotherhood with humanity. I want my students to use music as a means of developing their own compassion – I want them to listen more carefully, both literally and in a more figurative sense of the word, so that they can achieve a heightened awareness of themselves, and of the world and of their unique places in it. By touching on the universality of the human experience, music encourages empathy between human beings, which is what helps to make this world a better place. Music has incredible capabilities, and I can only wish that music will become a necessary aspect of the proper education of every individual.