Songs My Student Taught Me: Narrative of an Early Childhood Cello Teacher

Out of the mouth of babes (and even more nonverbal) has come perhaps the wisest music teacher education I have ever received. In this narrative I share my foibles as a young, over-confident, and naive music instructor who, through a great amount of error, eventually learned the value of letting a child lead his own music learning. Throughout this narrative I highlight excerpts from teaching and parent journals that I collected and analyzed during a twelve-month period in which I taught Danny--a four-year-old cello student whose already refined sense of musicianship and innate desire to learn rarely meshed with my efforts to teach certain skills and repertoire that I thought would be "best for him." I candidly share my arrogance, mistakes, and personal learning experiences while also revealing tensions that emerged through various parent-child-teacher interactions (manifested in shades of perfectionism and the clash between expressiveness and technique). In contrast, other stories reveal spontaneous and tender music-making moments at times when Danny, Mother, and I would just simply "play."