Violin Video Lesson: Why I Teach … What I Teach … How I Teach

So I'm sure that all violin teachers have a story to tell about how and why they decided to teach. Well, I'm no different.

I too have a story I would like to share with you in this video.

Why I teach? What I teach? How I teach.

Okay, so I've been teaching the violin since I was 20, but because I was pursuing a performance career, I didn't take it seriously at the time.

I needed all my energies to be focused on my goals, which were to become well known as a violinist and create a string quartet.

So teaching was something I did, but I didn't really think too hard about it.

So I was performing a lot with my quartet and we were in residence at the Aspen Festival in UC Irvine in Southern California.

After some years, I made the decision to move to France, where I was performing, but an opportunity arose to teach at a conservatory and I decided to go for it. But I really didn't know what I was getting myself into, is when I was hired, I suddenly inherited a studio of over 30 students. On top of it, my French was rudimentary, not at all fluent.

The fact that I got the position proves that I was very good at bluffing.

Well, I was about to begin teaching at the conservatory when suddenly I realized that it was next to impossible to prepare for this. I had no idea what it would be like teaching French students in a French conservatory. So after thinking about it a bit, I decided to spend the first week of lessons simply asking students questions like what they'd like to do outside the violin, or what kind of food they like, or who their favorite violinist was, you know, that kind of thing. Well, I'm sure they thought I was a bit crazy, but by the end of the week, I became very depressed.

You see, my questions had revealed that we really had very little in common playing wise, and because of that, I had no idea what or how to teach them.

I spent that weekend trying to figure out what I could do, what I could teach them, but I hit a brick wall.

Then on my way to the first lesson, I got an idea.

I would teach them something obvious, and this would start us off in the right direction.

What I told them was that they didn't need to press, to squeeze, to string all the way down to the fingerboard to make a sound.

So I began the next week of teaching fully expecting to see amazement in their faces from what I had told them, but instead I got nothing.

After a few lessons, I asked the next student if I had not been clear the week before, and they told me yes, but what I had said was impossible.

You know, if you don't squeeze the string to the fingerboard, there's no sound.

Well, I was determined to prove to them I was right, and they were determined to prove me wrong, and just like that, I'd begun my teaching journey with a revolution.

The kinds of reactions that I had in those early, early years of teaching led me to ask myself a lot of questions.

I had to ask myself just how I learned to do what. I was asking them to do.

I was lucky enough to have had Stephen Klopp and Dorothy DeLay as my teachers, as they encouraged me to figure things out on my own, which helped me better retrace the steps that I took.

But sharing this process had to be in French, so I not only needed to understand what I did, but I had to figure out how to translate the experience into another language, into another culture.

So after a few years of teaching at the conservatory, the director called me into his office and explained to me that he was going to assign me beginners to teach as my older students were starting to graduate and move on to the next conservatory.

I immediately worried that this could be problematic, as I had never taught a beginner.

And because it would be in French, the issues of language and culture suddenly became even more critical.

Well, this meant that I had to dig deeper and look into how I had started.

Use that to find a way that suited me and be culturally correct for my French beginners.

It was at this point that I decided to create a book of French children's songs with artwork and the songs text to use with them. I figured these songs would be known by most families, that they would have probably sung them when they were children. So this would be the perfect way to involve the parents in their learning experience. So I explored French songs and came up with 15 that I thought would be suitable for learning the violin.

I started with Una sur Verte.

I chose it because it started by using the first finger, which helps set the hand, and then with three, two, one, or D, C sharp, B.

But before they started playing the songs, I set the stage by going to the piano and playing major and minor seconds for them to identify.

I did this from the piano because I didn't want them to develop a subconscious image of what playing the violin should look like. In other words, I didn't want them to imitate their teacher. I didn't want them to imitate me.

Now, as they were five and six year olds, instead of using big words like major and minor, I called these concepts happy and sad.

Once they could hear them, I used their newly learned skill to guide their fingers into making patterns using words like hold step and half step. Using these patterns to place their fingers allowed them to play the songs in my book.

Using these patterns as well led them to be able to play one octave scales and later two octave scales. So you see, I had taught them about the tetrachords without them ever knowing what a tetrachord was.

But after a while, I ran into the problem of what to give them after my chanson book.

I really wasn't crazy about the books that I learned from, so I decided to do a review and see where I really felt comfortable with the materials that were around.

I came up with Kaiser and Vivaldi A minor concerto. Using these as a destination, I created a book that I called Melodies to bridge the gap.

You see, what I did was to explore what skills were needed to be able to do when playing the Vivaldi and the Kaiser. And from those observations, wrote a melody to introduce each of the needed skills to the student.

This took about six to seven months, but when I had finished, I composed 16 melodies and eight of what I call short shifts to study positions.

My Melodies book was born.

Yes, later on, when the students were able, I gave them a sheet of paper with four pairs of fingerings for three octave scales, both major and minor. But because my page was only numbers, they told me it was difficult for them and begged me to write out the notes, which I did using an ink pen on manuscript paper. So, no racing.

And then there was a lot of photocopying, scissors and pasting. Well, in the end, this was another piece to my pedagogical puzzle.

I gained a lot of knowledge from digging so deeply into the beginnings of my learning how to play the violin.

All of this was invaluable to me later on, as it allowed me to better evaluate the needs of older students.

I was better able to fill in the blanks in their notes. At this point came my next problem, how to decide what pieces to give the students after they had gone through my curriculum of chanson, melodies, Kaiser and Vivaldi.

Well, in the French system back then, there were exams which happened at every level of study at the conservatory and determined whether or not the student moved on to the next level.

The pieces for each level were given six to nine weeks before the exams, so they were a surprise to everyone.

The whole concept was so very different from what I knew from my studies in the U .S., but I did my best to prepare the students.

So to help guide me, I decided to look at what a student needed to be able to play at the end of their studies with me to audition to the next level conservatory.

With this information, I was able to build a list of short -cases and concertos to learn by working back from what they would need to continue.

But as the years went on, I felt that the yearly exam didn't tell the student enough of what I thought about their progress.

So I started doing an assessment that I would give them in January.

I did this assessment in front of them and their parents, explaining by detailing the different aspects of their training where they stood in each category.

I did give a numerical value to each skill, but no one ever got a perfect score.

While I had gone through my learning to teach process in French, you can imagine the problem though with 15 years later, we returned to the U .S. This made for some very awkward moments in my lessons at the beginning as I was translating a lot in my head, so there are many long pauses.

Going back to the U .S. also meant that I needed to revisit my curriculum. So I looked into what concertos, solo pieces, and Bach would be needed to audition into university or conservatory programs after high school.

This was what I had done in France. So like in France, I worked backwards from there.

My experiences taught me that there were many ways to get to an end. So I didn't just make a single way to get there, but I grouped them in ways that allowed me to navigate different routes rather than only having one way.

Like this, I could adapt to the varying needs of my students.

Around the same time, I felt like I had to do the same thing with etudes. So I used Paganini Caprices as a starting point and worked again backwards from there. This led to my lift of etude study, but I needed more. I wanted to correlate the etudes with skills.

So I made a list of skills and noted which etudes fell in line with which skills.

All this was done against the background of something someone told me that they had done. They learned half the Paganini Caprices by the age of 16.

And then they learned the next 12 over the next couple of years because they were asked to play all 24 in a concert.

I was truly, truly impressed with the accomplishment, but what caught my eye was that they had learned 12 caprices before they were 16.

So I started calculating.

If they learned three per year, they would have started at the age of 12.

I then counted how many etudes that were in my list.

There were 212. So I figured that if they learned an etude every two weeks, it would have taken eight to nine years.

This meant that they would have had to have started Kaiser around the age of three or two. From this calculation, I understand that they did do all the etudes.

This observation led me to understand that my list would be best used if I were to try and assess what skills the students needed and navigate accordingly, but not give them all the etudes.

So this all made sense to me, but digging a bit deeper, I had to ask myself if the etudes were used to learn the skill or if they needed to have the skill before they learned the etudes.

Well, this led me to remember what I had done back in the day. I got up at six o 'clock every morning and around 630, practiced just one finger scales for about one and a half hours and then tratexed school of violin techniques book one for an hour and a quarter.

I did this routine for every day for a year. But why did I do it? Well, it seemed to me that as a violinist, we could only really do two things. One was moving up and down the fingerboard and the other was across the strings. Wow.

The yost was for moving up and down the fingerboard and the tratex was from moving across the strings.

Oh yes, I later took the tratex and turned some of them upside down.

Instead of going zero, one, two, three, four, three, two, one, I went four, three, two, one, zero, one, two, three.

I did this because from the beginning, from my first chanson, I started from the third finger and went three, two, one, zero. I went that way. I didn't learn it this way. Well, I learned it one, two, three, four, but I felt like the hand was a lot looser if you started this way and went backwards.

All of this helped me more clearly define in my mind my goal with students, which was to help them empower themselves, to help them to be able to teach themselves, to not be afraid to search for what they needed to learn.

Stephen Klap once told me, you know what my job is? My job is to put myself out of a job.

Well, I hope this video has given you a glimpse into the journey I undertook to develop the techniques I've implemented in my studio over the years.

The videos in this series, Why I Teach, What I Teach, How I Teach, which are presented by Fritz P, will explore, for all those who have an interest, the insights I have gained over my 50 plus years of teaching and performing.

If you have any thoughts or questions, please pop them in the comments below. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell to be sure to know about the latest video in the series.

Thanks for watching.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---