Love Is Forever, But Oft Forgotten

When writing these articles I often “quote” teachers. Actually, I try very hard to disguise the original question. In this case, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. There’s nothing I can leave out or change that isn’t pertinent to her anguish as a teacher. So I got her permission to quote it in full. Here it is:

“Have you noticed this, too? When I first began teaching many moons ago, I was working with advanced violin students. They were all quite motivated, set up beautifully by a previous teacher, and were passionate about playing. At the same time, I was starting little ones whose parents had been trained in violin through the marvelous program I had grown up in. Certainly, they valued the training as much as I did, and they wanted their children to have the same experience. What I quickly learned about many of these parents was they had an extremely conflicted, antagonistic relationship with music because it had been based on their having been “good” at it, and when they moved on with their lives, they no longer had that. They felt like failures, and they passed that on to their kids. Similarly, my advanced kids, with the exception of one, matured and moved on into their lives and they, like the other parents, had not continued with music in any way: going to concerts, playing in the community orchestra, and the like. They just stopped. It made me feel like I, as their teacher, had let them down. So, I’ve been really interested in sparking that passion of making music in a child and seeing it through so it becomes a part of them. I’m not talking about majoring in violin performance at some major music school. I’m referring to it being so much a part of them that it is in their lives in some meaningful way. That’s the gift. What has been your experience?”

Wow, has she hit the nail on its very sore head. Here we are all teaching something that we love, that we must love—why else would we have spent all those hours practicing, years at lessons and in conservatories or music programs, many of us running up large student debt in a profession notorious for not making anyone rich, lots of money and time spent on teacher training courses? It’s either love or severe masochism. I would vote for love (although the other may sometime appear to be the case). Love is what sustains any relationship whether it’s your marriage, your relationship with your children, your friends, your job, or even your hobbies. So our teacher here is worried that she has failed to transmit this love to her students and thus has failed them.

First of all, I am going to reassure her.

Just because you may not see certain friends or even speak to them for donkey’s years, doesn’t mean you don’t love them. I have just reconnected with a friend I hadn’t been able to find for 50 years. We picked up right where we left off. The feeling is still there. So, if your ex-students get busy with life, families, small children, further university training, career building (outside music), it doesn’t mean they don’t love music. It just means they’re too busy to participate in community orchestras or go to concerts (which can be quite expensive) at this point in their lives. It also doesn’t mean that they don’t listen to music and that it isn’t an integral part of their lives which you, the teacher, can’t possibly know about unless they tell you. It also doesn’t mean that you, the teacher, have not had an enormous impact on the aesthetic and spiritual lives of your students. They won’t tell you this either when they’re in their twenties; they’re too busy and too close to the experience to appreciate it. Wait until they’re in their forties and all of a sudden you may start getting some startling feedback. Besides, it isn’t for us to judge by outward appearances how, what and how much someone loves.

28/11/2021 10:17:18 Scritto da: Eloise Hellyer