this is what I do

When I was fifteen, I began studying violin with a member of the National Symphony Orchestra as part of an elite scholarship program for high school students. I had played violin since I was 8, but this was the beginning of really taking it seriously. Mr. S was a grandfatherly type of figure at the beginning – warm, nurturing, pulling the soul out of every note. I loved him, and I loved violin.

After awhile, the pressure started to set in. He would tell me about my “future”, all the grand things he thought I should do with the violin. Whenever he was fed up with the National Symphony, he would tell me that I was “too good” for the NSO – no, I must pursue something better, like the Boston Symphony. (Now those of you who know what this means can join me in collective laughter.) At one point, when I told him I wanted to teach, his face fell. “Well,” he said, “You can do THAT on the side, of course. But you have to do more than that. You can’t JUST teach. You’re too good to JUST teach.”

In the months that followed, our teacher-student relationship quickly devolved. He pressured me to learn more repertoire, harder repertoire, at a faster rate than I was capable of. I started getting depressed and burned out. He had me perform in a masterclass with the renowned Pamela Frank – just two weeks after I started work on a major violin concerto. Then, when I didn’t play up to his expectations (though I adored the class and learned a lot), he dressed me down for “disappointing” him. I bawled my eyes out and spent two days in a depressed stupor in bed. I was only 17.

My mom tried to talk some reason into him. A few months later, he kicked me out of his studio – he couldn’t have “parents telling him how to teach”, he said.

In the aftermath of this horrific experience, I began my studies with Ronda Cole – the most renowned teacher in the DC area, and one that I had been told was “impossible” to get in with. Ronda was more than a teacher to me, she was (and is) a friend, a mentor, a guide. She used the very thing that had been used against me – music – to heal my heart. I went on to study with her at the University of Maryland, where she also ran a graduate violin pedagogy program. I took all the courses as an undergrad and, upon graduating, did exactly what Mr. S told me I shouldn’t do:

I became a teacher.
JUST a teacher.

And even though for all these years my conscious mind has disagreed with his statement that someone truly talented would never “JUST teach”, my subconscious mind believed him. I have belittled my profession – not out loud, but to myself. I have thought myself a failure because I don’t perform much anymore, because I didn’t go to grad school, because because because. Because I couldn’t get into the Boston Symphony even if I practiced ten hours a day. Heck, I couldn’t even get into the NSO – the orchestra Mr. S told me I “was too good for.”

Frankly, it’s easy to belittle what I do because it’s not exactly something people admire (or are even very aware of.) Everyone knows the music teacher down the street – how is she special? It’s not like she’s a lawyer, or doctor, or – in the music world – a performer.

But as my studio has slowly grown into what I’ve envisioned it being all along, I’ve started realizing a few things. A few things that I want to share with the world because I’m tired of belittling myself and thinking myself a failure, of letting myself take the “second-rate” position amongst my professional-musician colleagues just because I don’t perform.

I teach something that requires:

* the precision of a brain surgeon
* the flexibility and athleticism of a gymnast
* the imagination of a painter
* the mind of a mathematician
* the voice of a singer
* the discipline of an Iron Man Triathlon competitor

…and I teach all this to four-year-olds.

There are a lot of violinists who “teach violin on the side” as Mr. S encouraged me to do. Their students scratch and squeak on their instruments for a few years. Most of them give up out of frustration, or because it sounds downright BAD, or because they realize there’s no future in making that kind of awful noise.

There are a lot of violinists who “do what I do”, and yet a very small number who can do it as well as I do. I don’t say that to toot my own horn or out of arrogance (indeed I am well aware of all my shortcomings as a teacher); I say it to be honest for the first time in the twelve years I’ve been doing this. The truth is, my students play well. They create a beautiful sound on their instruments, whether they are 4 or 14. They have impeccable technique and musicianship. There are only a handful of teachers who can say this about their students. Not just one or two of their students, but ALL their students.

But more than just developing fine musicians, I have realized recently that I’m doing something else: I’m helping develop fine human beings. Playing the violin is difficult – arguably one of the most difficult musical instruments you could attempt to learn. To learn it, to stick with it, to deal with the trials and tribulations of practice…it grows a person. I told one of my high school students recently that the thing about playing the violin is that every day you show up to your failures. The only way to get better is to stare straight in the mirror and see all the ways you fail. It takes an immense heart and strength of character to be able to do that, day in and day out, in pursuit of something. Most people give up, try for something easier. I help my students push through, to learn that the “biggest obstacle to being great is being good.”

We have a lot of tears in my studio as we stand in front of this mirror. Sometimes I’m more of a therapist than a violin teacher…there is much psychology involved in studying something at so deep a level. I talk about identity, about being versus doing, about showing up and doing the work, about being an artist…and I have these conversations with children. Oh, and also with their parents – you wouldn’t believe the conversations we have about parenting!

Sometimes it feels like most people I know don’t respect what I do. Of course, that may be because for so long I myself have not really respected it, listening deep to those words of Mr. S from my seventeenth year. But some of it is that people don’t even know what I do, or they associate what I do with that “music teacher down the street” whose students squawk and squeal and everyone smiles and says “oh how cute, at least they’re having fun and being exposed to music.”

I’m not entirely sure what inspired this little rant essay. I am currently on maternity leave and thinking deep about how to balance my new job as mother with my other job as teacher. I’m realizing how being a mom is my #1 priority, but my teaching is a priority in my life as well, because I’ve finally started to believe t has value. I  remember it hit me a few months ago, when I started going through our financial records to prepare for doing our taxes. I realized that, in a little less than 20 hours a week, I made nearly as much money last year as my husband did in his (full-time) much-more-elite-sounding-job as a communications consultant. There it was in black and white….in at least one sense, what I do has value. Of course money doesn’t mean much, unless you’re an artist and everyone tells you that to be an artist you’d better get used to being poor, because artists don’t make money. Musicians don’t make money – how many times have you heard that? And music teachers…well…we all know they’re second-rate musicians at best (just think of the old adage those who can’t do, teach) – how could they possibly make money?

So I’m sitting there, realizing :: what I do is pretty special and people do value it. Ok so maybe my friends don’t know or understand or respect what I do, but my students’ parents do. They shell out the money, they sit down with their child every day and practice. Why? According to them, because I’m making a difference in their child’s life.

There’s no “just” about that.