The first full week of May was Teacher Appreciation Week in
the U.S. I appreciate the impetus to think back on my violin teachers. It’s just
hard to write something that can do them justice, which is why the whole week
went by without my doing so! It took me the whole week just to draft this set
of memories of my first violin teacher.
My first violin teacher was Ms. Y. She taught strings in my
hometown school district, and she quite literally taught me how to pick up the
violin for the first time in fifth grade. After I started private violin
lessons in ninth or tenth grade—I had never had any other sort of music lessons
outside of school—she was still my orchestra conductor at school until I
finished high school.
Those of us who started instrumental music as fifth graders
(typical in our school district) had weekly lessons in groups of four or five
students. I believe that each lesson lasted thirty minutes, and we met in a
windowless interior room with cinderblock walls. There was just enough time for
each of us to play a couple of short (one- or two-line) pieces we’d been
working on, get a little individual coaching, and then practice as a group on
material for the following week. Looking back, I can’t imagine how she got us
through all of that—plus tuning—in such a short time!
Every time I offered up my ¾ size rental violin for her to
tune, Ms. Y would exclaim, “Hi, lady!” or “Hi, Miss TR!” and “How’s your kid?”—"kid" being her universal nickname for everyone's instrument. She
found praise for everything we played, and established an elaborate reward
system for learning our short little pieces. If you played your assigned piece
well enough at the group lesson, you earned a happy face sticker in the margin
of your music. For every ten happy faces, you earned the candy bar of your
choice. I always chose a
Nestle Crunch bar. (Just writing about it makes me want to have one—haven’t
tasted one of those in years!) I think the happy face system only applied to
fifth and sixth graders, but it really got us to practice. Maybe parents these
days would quibble about junk food, but at the time, I never heard anyone
question it.
I don’t want to romanticize Ms. Y's policy of spending her own money on
stickers and candy bars for her students, which she did over the course of
decades. Too often, public school teachers are either spoken about like saints for
their sacrifices and selflessness on behalf of their students, or spoken about
as lazy parasites who care nothing about their students if they want more compensation
for their work (or want to actually collect the compensation promised to them
when they signed up for the job). (The
Daily Show has handled this contradiction brilliantly.)
Spending her own money to encourage her students to practice was just part of
who Ms. Y was; I have equal respect for other teachers who found different ways
to encourage us.
Many of Ms. Y’s students followed the same path I did—taking
small group lessons with her in fifth and sixth grade, then taking “Orchestra”
as a class from seventh grade through the end of high school. When a bully in
junior high left notes in my locker from a fake secret admirer, or when another
bully paid a boy $5 to grab my butt in P.E. class, or any other thing that made
junior high feel like torment, orchestra was a refuge. Ms. Y made me—and all of
us, I think—feel understood and valued. Frankly, even though I had a wonderful
family and trusted circle of friends, orchestra was sometimes the only part of
my daily routine in junior high and high school that did not stress me out,
bore me silly, or involve constant fear of impending humiliation. At a point
when I had the opportunity to switch to a different high school in our
community that might have offered a better social and/or academic environment,
I refused to consider it—that school did not have Ms. Y.
So: Just one of the teachers to whom I thank my involvement
in music, and all that it’s done for me, is Ms. Y!
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