by compound complex 73 Replies latest social physical
Humbled: Do your students ever have impediments to clear writing because they can’t identify a thought or a feeling?
Only all the time!
That's really the challenge: to learn how to articulate and express those elusive and/or hard to define thoughts and feelings.
Heck, it's hard enough to write clearly when I know what I'm thinking and feeling! ... LOL
Do your students ever have impediments to clear writing because they can’t identify a thought or a feeling? -- humbled
This is music, with a different manner of expression. My 8-year-old piano student, Tommy, is a precocious child, both academically and musically. He tells me outright what emotions he is feeling while composing his pieces on the keyboard. Of course, this is by means of the faculty of speech. He is articulate and to the point. Is the music sad, that which he has performed in a minor key? It is a man sitting under a tree and crying. As I continue both to explain and to demonstrate specific techniques to open up his remarkable compositional abilities, his musical expressions become technically more complex and, most importantly, aesthetically pleasing.
Therefore, it has been my experience that, as we learn new words and how to arrange them into meaningful modes of verbal expression, we become better able to say what we are feeling. The teacher takes the student's idea, however simple and unformed, and helps him develop that idea into beautifully articulated words or music or painting (another form of art).
This is important, where I earlier mentioned my explaining and demonstrating the how-to of a matter: first, I explain and ask questions, allowing the student to figure out how to do what I ask. He has the tools -- can he employ them to figure out how to play a knotty passage on the piano? Can he use the elements of grammar, syntax, etc. to form a clear and potent composition of words? I demonstrate, i.e., give him the spoken or visual/aural answer (keyboard), to show the actuality of what I asked him to perform. Or, as a last resort, I will demonstrate how that difficult passage is played if he gets stuck and has no answer.
Well, I could go on and on, but I'll stop here . . .
THANKS!
I might have copied and pasted all of the above. I’ve read it couple times. And finally the following memory poked its head out of the past.
About 10 years ago I worked in the Facilities Department at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They had a summer music camp. There were instructors and young teens in every nook and cranny of the building. (Pheromones so thick l could hardly breathe) Parking my cleaning cart in the entrance of one of the smaller restroom l was to clean, I realized just beyond near the alcove leading to an outside garden there was a tutor and a boy holding his sax. The words of the tutor to his student, a boy of perhaps 13, fascinated me. Best l can remember he said:
“... and don’t be tempted to go down the road that some musicians do. To “feel the music” even famous players have gone into drugs or alcohol. You don’t have to do that to play with power, play with feeling. You can take your head and put it in a special place without doing that. Some good musicians use drugs and alcohol to unlock their heart —but after a while it breaks them. You gotta learn how to get into your own head sober.”
Unfortunately l had toilets to clean so can’t say if the kid’s tutor had more than cautions on the matter. Maybe later he gave guidance as you did for Thomas on the safer methods to artistic “madness”.
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Interesting conversation.
Thanks, humbled, for that great story.
I still have nightmares about cleaning bathrooms in huge industrial complexes when I did graveyard. Some things never leave you.
