It takes a lot of energy to teach for 4 hours. I was pretty hungry when I got on the train back to New York. But also very energized. Somehow seeing a person and then looking at them even more deeply pulls energy out of my. It's there, if I don't try to bottle it up.
Teaching children is a window into a family. Just as I start to see certain physical habits that appear in kids, I can hear certain tropes with parents. Children that say straight away, "We forgot to practice!" or "We didn't practice at all!" being tempered by a parent apologetically trying to explain that they did a little or something to that effect. The truth is perhaps somewhere in between, but it doesn't matter to me so much as what is happening in that moment. People can be very concerned about being right. How does this happen to them? It isn't everyone, but it's often the people that are deemed "successful." I sometimes reflect about what I miss about my high school. Maybe that is part of it. There were people that were unafraid of being wrong, or unconventional. Maybe not the most successful people (though the magic was when that wasn't the case), but they offered a sense of freedom to the grind.
I'd like to share this with the parents of my students. I do care that they practice, and I do know that this takes effort, it's not all fun all the time. But it is ok to have fun, it is ok to break out of the routine of practice for a minute, to run fingers across the strings in a way the teacher never suggested, to try something new and perhaps risk being wrong. And it is especially ok if I get to enjoy it and know about it as well.
I was tired after the day, but am really excited for the year, for what I will learn from this experience of exchanges.
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