My Personal Attributes
Or, why I should be a Music Teacher
The best seasons I ever had with high school marching band and wind ensemble were those where we were having fun. More specifically, those seasons where we were imbued with a fiery need to perform the music we had as best as we could. To discover what the feeling of creating good music is, to capture the emotions of centuries past and centuries present, that fire is what was the driving force behind my favorite seasons. The feeling of being able to do anything you put your mind to not on the first or second try, but on some try because you will not give up or quit. That enthusiasm.
So, a music teacher is someone who is passionate beyond belief about music. Passionate not only about creating music, but about sharing music. A sort of meta-passion about imbuing others with the same sense of sheer determination and sense of ability that comes with an unwillingness to give up. I know I am that person because I have proved it to myself time and time again.
The first step is proving to myself that I have the passion for learning about music. I know I have that because I tried 3 times to get into Jacobs, never giving up and always striving to better my performance. When I thought about what would happen if I didn’t make it into Jacobs, my back-up plans always involved music in some fashion. Blind passion didn’t get me anywhere the first two tries, though.
It was passion with direction that saw the greatest improvements. Passion coupled with guidance from seeing a teacher regularly, from checking in on what my friends thought of my musicianship, from listening intently not only to my own playing but the playing and criticisms of everyone around me. A student learns best when they are enthusiastic and motivated about what they are learning, and have good guidance to what new things they can try when old things fail. Because I have an unbreakable passion for music and experience with both no guidance and good guidance, I know I can be a great music teacher.
My Professional Development Goals
Most musicians I know started music lessons when they were very young—some as young as three or four. That means they have an eight year head start on me for navigating the world of formal, efficient self development. However, this does not mean I need to spend 10 hours a day in the practice room to catch up; as a trumpet player 4 hours a day is plenty to wear me out. Instead I must capitalize on the idea of efficient practice, setting priorities and reaching goals with as little resistance as possible.
To be a good music teacher, I’ve got to be a good musician and a good teacher. Being a good musician, to me, means having such a mastery over the fundamentals of one’s instrument that picking up a new style is a month or two’s chore. I am not at that point yet, where I can walk into a lesson with a faculty member and work on maximizing the style and creative influences I’m going for rather than learning how to play the instrument better. By the time I reach my senior year, I want the large majority of my lessons to be style-focused rather than fundamentals-focused. To get there means dedicating myself to slow, methodical study of the fundamentals of trumpet until they are muscle memory.
To be a good teacher means, as I said above, being able to adapt to new, problematic situations without losing enthusiasm, hope, or passion. I’ve got the “not losing enthusiasm, hope, or passion” part pretty much down, so now I need to build up a good base of strategies to use when trying to communicate a new skill to someone else. That means, of course, taking lots of education courses, but it also means getting some field experience. I’m going to apply for an internship at the Lutheran Summer Music academy, a month-long training program for musicians, to get lots of great teaching experience and meet lots of great people. If I don’t make that internship, I will sell lessons in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana, both in order to get better at teaching and to fund any future music endeavors.
So, to summarise what my professional development goals are: develop fundamentals through slow, efficient practice; apply for LSM for both performance and teaching opportunities; and/or begin teaching/providing music services in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana. This will help me become a well-rounded musician and an effective educator.