Weekly happenings in Granville

Some exciting things have happened in Granville lately.  Let me first say that the Thanksgiving season came SO QUICKLY this year!  I had been hearing all about how gorgeous the autumn leaves would be up here, so I had my eyes open, on the lookout for those colors!

One day, the leaves were starting to turn a rusty brown color, and then we got this huge rain and wind storm in the night.  When we awoke, the leaves that were still on the trees were completely dark brown.  So we missed the beautiful colors this fall. 

 

But the crisp, fall (and winter) air is here to stay! 

On October 27th, our church held a family and friends night.  We had a bonfire, and hotdogs and hamburgers as well as s'mores. 

  

 

We were so excited to have quite a few visitors there!

 

I think everyone had a nice time. 

 

I celebrated my 26th birthday last week.  Dan bought me some candles (I had been out of candles for a long time and missed them!) and took me to dinner.  It was a nice birthday. 

 

On Saturday, it snowed here!  That was the second time it snowed.  Of course it blew around more than anything. 

 

 

People up here think I'm crazy, but I love snow and winter!  The worst thing about the snowy weather will be having to cancel church services. 

I absolutely love church, and I'll miss it when we can't have it.

 

On Fridays, we always go to the local nursing home and sing songs and Dan preaches a short message.  This past week, we finished our service, and the staff started gathering together all of the residents into the dining hall.  They were going to have a small ceremony to honor all of the resident veterans!  So we stayed for that.  I really enjoyed it.  We DID sing the Star Spangled Banner (accompanied by a cd track) and it was arranged for an orchestra, not a choir.  As a result, I was jumping octaves the whole time, and Dan was the only brave soul to sing a G above middle C.  haha!

 

 

 

 

 This is the picture Dan took of all of the veterans. 

 

I was going to post a few videos of our little dog, doing some tricks, but they wont upload for some reason, so I'll post them next time. 

Until later!

 

 

Bad Music Teachers

Lest my readers begin to believe that my blog is only comprised of rants and raves, I promise that my next post is going to be an update on regular life, with pictures and all. 

However, the subject I am about to address has been on my mind for years.  I have attempted to put into words my thoughts concerning poor music teachers before, but never finished the posts.  I decided that the time has come for me to speak up though, and address these concerns. 



Let me first say that while I have been teaching music lessons for seven years, I am by no means an expert on the matter.  I do not claim to know everything there is to know about teaching music.  But if I have learned anything in my seven years of teaching, it has been that there are horrible teachers out there who ought not be teaching at all. 

I grew up being taught piano by my mother.  I can tell you all that there are many things for which I am thankful to my mother for, but one of the biggest things is that she taught me all she knew about piano.  My mother took lessons for only a few years herself as a teenager, but was primarily self-taught; especially in the area of playing by ear. 

My mother has a strong gift of teaching in general.  She taught many piano students when I was younger.  I struggled very much as a child and teenager with understanding music theory.  Being taught theory out of a book just didn't work for me.  When I arrived at college, I could sight-read nearly any piece of piano music, but I didn't know my chords, how to play by ear or how to improvise.  Those three things were what I had to learn at college.  And I worked hard to learn them. 

Since I worked my whole childhood to become proficient at sight-reading, and my whole college life learning to be proficient in improvisation and theory, it truly bothers me to see music teachers in life who are barely proficient at all, attempting to teach children. 

When I was living in Maryland, I was offered an accompanying job for a public elementary school, accompanying their Christmas and spring programs.  I was just fine with doing this.  After the Christmas program, one of the music teachers in the school asked me if I would consider accompanying her private student voice recital the following week.  I agreed and we exchanged numbers. 
The thing that bothered me most was not that she gave me to the music for her students the night of the recital (though that was EXTREMELY unprofessional).  No, the thing that bothered me most was realizing that her voice recital was actually her voice students combined with her piano students.  This allowed me to see her teaching method in action and it absolutely appalled me.  Each child had to be told where to place their hands before beginning, and many of those were told to start in the completely wrong place!  As a result, you can imagine that the songs were all unrecognizable.

I was expecting that the vocal solos would be somewhat challenging, based on the fact that this teacher admitted to me that she was unable to accompany them herself due to a lack of ability.  However, most of the music I was given looked like this:

 

(free music from online)

 

I left that recital grieved in my spirit, even though I had made money.  Those poor students! 

In that woman's partial defense, she was an amazing, operatic singer.  She had a beautiful voice!  But simply because one can sing well does NOT follow that they ought to teach- voice OR piano! 

I know how to sing fairly well.  I can sight-sing, and sing any part.  But I will not open up a voice studio because my heart wouldn't be in teaching voice.  I wouldn't be able to help students to have the amazing overtones they could have, because I struggle finding my own!  I have come to realize that my musical abilities stop somewhere. 

My sincere and humble advice to all music teachers is to PLEASE examine your musical desire.  If it isn't voice, PLEASE don't teach voice.  If it isn't piano, PLEASE don't teach piano.  I have seen all too many teachers who obviously are teaching whatever they can in order to make another $20/lesson.  So if they sort of know how to play the piano, they try teaching it. 

I saw this happening so much in both Maryland and California. 

Why am I so passionate about this? 


I have had many students come to me from other teachers.  In order to understand where the student is coming from, I ask questions about their understanding of theory, sight-reading, and musicality in general.  VERY few of them know much of anything, sadly. 

Recently, I had two young girls begin taking lessons with me regularly.  I came to find out that their previous teacher would teach them one song at a time out of the Alfred 1a book.  They would continue on that song for one month, until they could play it from memory.  I know that they do not exaggerate this because the teacher wrote the dates at the top of each song.  Not only that, but this teacher wrote in every note of each song. 
They have been in the same Alfred book for 2 years. 

On our first lesson, I simply said that they were never going to see the notes written in again.  And today (6 weeks later), I had a lesson with both girls.  They are both in three books each now, with 1-2 songs in each book.  I was so proud of them today!  They each passed the song that I gave them last week to practice, and I had them sight-read their new songs for the first time.  They weren't perfect, but very close!  The older of the two girls knows her C and G scales, and has memorized her chords in both keys. 

I say again, I am learning myself!  I haven't arrived.  I don't know everything there is to know about teaching music.  But I am constantly working to get better.  Refreshing my memory of chords and scales on Chord Dr (a program created by my piano teacher from college) and reading Friedrich Wieck's Piano and Song keeps me on the right track pedagogically.  Constantly sight-reading through Haydn, Beethoven and Bach (not to mention playing for church) keeps me sharp in my proficiency.  

If you teach music, I beg of you, keep yourself sharp! Practice! Read! Learn!

If you are thinking of teaching an instrument that you couldn't sit down and play at an instant's notice, please re-consider.  If you aren't proficient, it is unlikely that your students ever will be.
Don't be a bad music teacher.    

Parents who are paying good money for your child to learn, do your research before signing on with a teacher.  Have you ever heard the teacher play proficiently? Is your child progressing?


As always, if you have any thoughts to share about this, please comment below!

Reflections on Halloween

Halloween.

There are so many differing opinions about Halloween and whether or not to celebrate it, especially amongst evangelical Christians.  I understand how it must be harder to make this decision when one has young children.  Today's culture emphasizes the family fun in dressing your child up in a cute costume and going to family and neighbors homes to get candy. 
I do not have children, but I know how I feel about Halloween. 

I would first of all point out that whether or not you celebrate Halloween, it is each persons decision.  If all of my family and each of my friends celebrated Halloween, I would respect their opinion and not hound them for the decision they made for their family. 

I recall as a child how we never celebrated Halloween.  We never went trick-or-treating or even carved a pumpkin.  As a young child, I didn't understand why, but I never questioned the decision my parents made.  Each Halloween, we would make up small bags of candy and put a chick tract in each one and then hand them out to the children who would come to our door.

The one thing that stands out to me most (even at my age!) in my memory was how very frightened I was to open that door and see the awful masks and costumes.  As I got older, I actually would refuse to open the door, because I was so frightened.  Now, I understand that today's generation of young children is used to seeing scary things on TV.  In fact, most video games and new movies have some underlying (or blatant!)gore, guts, violence, and superhuman creatures (werewolves, zombies, vampires ect.).  But I would ask, is that a good thing?

Someday, when I have children of my own, I want them to be innocent; how children should be.  Children learn about violence and the scary things in life too soon even without us showing them.  So why are we exposing children to these things?  For the sake of getting candy?

This past Tuesday, I drove to my community choir rehearsal at 6:30, right when the trick-or-treaters were coming out.  The majority of people I saw in costume were teenagers and adults, most of whom were dressed as something utterly terrifying or in some scantily-clad costume, made up with what looked like pounds of makeup. 

My general question when deciding which holidays I will celebrate is this: "Does this holiday serve a genuine purpose?  What does this holiday teach?"

Christmas serves as a time when we remember the birth of Christ, our Savior.
Thanksgiving serves as a time when were recall the historical day when the pilgrims and Indians helped each other.  It is a time to give thanks.
Easter (or Resurrection Sunday, as I prefer to call it) serves as the day when we remember that Christ arose from the dead. 
The 4th of July commemorates the time in history when America declared her independence from Great Britain.


The list could go on, but Halloween?
Historically, Halloween was a time of superstition, fearing that the souls of the dead would haunt or come back to life.  Costumes were worn to trick the spirits of the dead into thinking that they were also spirits.  Lanterns were carved and a candle placed inside to symbolize the soul which was forever in purgatory, or a "in between place" between heaven and hell. 
Even if I don't consider the history of the "holiday" (and I use that term loosely, because I do not believe that it can be considered a "holy day"), and look at the facts that it is a day designated to dressing up in costume and getting candy from people, I do not find that convincingly beneficial. 

There are ways to have fun as a family without doing what everyone else does. 

I don't feel that as a child, I was deprived of a good thing when my parents decided to keep us from celebrating Halloween.  I had my fill of dressing up as historical characters for National History Day (for school) and acting different parts in church dramas and cantatas. 
Oh, and I was never deprived of candy either.  We each were allowed to have two pieces of hard candy each Sunday morning, before church.  😊😊😊😊😊

So no, I won't be celebrating Halloween.  The darkness of the day, scariness of the history, and pointlessness in general were enough to convince me to make this decision in my life. 

Please, don't hate me if you disagree.  I merely explain why I have decided not to acknowledge Halloween as a holiday.