Teaching Tip: Be Observant!

One of the best tips that I can offer a teacher or parent about how to be more effective as a teacher or parent is to be observant and pay attention to your student or child. When you watch carefully, you will figure out a great deal about what is going on in the head of that student or child. You will also gain valuable clues as to issues that negatively impact the student’s or child’s learning.

I was always fascinated with the stories of Dr. Suzuki’s listening to graduation recordings sent in by students. How, I wondered, could he be able to offer comments about the student’s posture or character issues just by listening to a recording? Now that I have taught for so many years myself, I can now understand how Dr. Suzuki accomplished this feat. I discern many things about a student, not only by watching the student, but also by listening, and using my sense of touch.

Most of the people in the world are visual learners, which means that they take in what happens around them through visual stimuli using their eyes. Try the following experiment: activate your “super ears” by closing your eyes and really listening hard without simultaneous visual stimulation.

How does your student or child sound when they walk into the room? A high school student of mine loves to wear a particular pair of cowboy boots. I can tell how she feels about herself and the upcoming lesson just by the way she clicks her feet when she walks into the room.

Can you hear that the student’s right elbow is too high or that there is tension in the student’s shoulder? The wispy tone is a dead giveaway. A high elbow usually means an over-pronated bow hold too. The index finger may be drooped over the stick and the pinkie may be straight and stiff, and the thumb may be showing signs of pushing through the underside of the frog and turning into a banana rather than being bent and strong and resting against the frog.

Can you hear the clunky bow change at the frog or the crunchy bow changes in general no matter what part of the bow? Check the bow hold again. Is the student relaxed? Is the student hanging out in the lower half of the bow most of the time?

Hear that slippery bow sound at the beginnings of notes? You can bet that the student’s bow is crooked or off the contact point in general. Or maybe the student is getting that squishy, soft sul tasto sound, where the bow is slipping over the fingerboard. Again, check the bow hold and see whether the student is completely opening up the right elbow when traveling the bow to the tip. Many students get a little bit sloppy and floppy once they develop “finger motion” with the right hand fingers, and the bow hold tends to suffer. Also, once students start reading music, they tend to focus on the music more and listen to the sound they produce less overall. I encourage my reading students to memorize their music repertoire as quickly as they can so that we can refocus on good posture, good articulation, and good sound. 

Now open your eyes and really observe your student or child. Are they looking at the music, if reading music is your purpose? I can tell by watching whether a student is really reading the music or whether they are playing by ear (or memory) and “appearing” to look at the music. Watch the student’s eyes. Are they focused or glazing over? Do they follow along with the music or does the student lose his or her place occasionally?

I have a really intelligent parent who has this disconcerting habit of slipping into a fixated stare at me in the middle of an instruction or conversation. I cannot tell if she is really listening to me or pretending to. The next time I experience this stare, I plan to stop talking or doing anything even if I am in mid-sentence. I cannot think of any other way to test my theory out. If she is really paying attention and just has that funny “look” in general when she is concentrating on a conversation or activity, then she will respond instantly to my stopping in the middle of my sentence or activity and ask me why I stopped. If she does not respond to my interrupted speech, my suspicion will be confirmed (at least at that moment in time), and I will need to think of a way to address this issue.

Students are a bit trickier to discover when they are not paying attention. I see it as a lack of focus in the eyes. I also stop talking in these cases and consider whether talking is feeding the child’s tendency to “wander off” mentally. I usually draw the child’s focus back onto the activity or conversation by engaging them in conversation with a question about the activity. My questions begin with “what” or “how” in order to solicit actual responses of more than one or two words. (Note: I am not discussing specialized cases of learning issues here, such as ADD or ADHD).

With eyes closed again, feel the energy in the air as your student enters the studio. I can tell when a parent or child have had a fight in the car on the way to a lesson or when a student has had a hard day at school just by the quality of energy (or lack of it) when they enter the room. I sometimes hear that there was a fight because the student’s “hello” is glum and fuming, while the parent’s voice is overly cheerful and upbeat. I have even been able to tell which child is the parent’s favorite or easiest to raise in a family of more than one child just by listening to the parent’s tone of voice when they address each child. Parents beware of this! If I can hear a difference in the tone of voice, you can be sure that the children can too.

This week, be observant about your student or child. You may learn something new.

Intonation, part II: Ringing Notes and Super Ears

In my last discussion, I talked about improving intonation by improving tone. Today I want to talk about awakening the student's ear and kinesthetic sensations related to pitch. I do that by using the 9 natural ringing notes of first position and helping the student to hear tone and sympathetic vibrations. Along with seeing and hearing, I try to incorporate references to touch and sensation as well.

There are nine notes on the violin that naturally ring with a little extra sparkle in first position. They are those notes that bear the same names as the open strings: G, D, A, and E. These notes are:

©Paula E. Bird 2010

Use the fourth finger to play the D, A, and E. When I ask my student to play each of these notes, we note that the open string that bears the same name will sympathetically vibrate at the same time. If the student plays with a full, warm tone, the open string will vibrate with a greater width to match the depth of tone quality. This all presumes that the student is using the left hand properly and holding it in a way that allows the open strings to ring freely. A student who holds the left hand too low for the string to sound, will not hear the extra sparkle in the note's timbre.

Students of all ages seem to enjoy this exercise, even my really young elementary students. All students have been capable of seeing and hearing the sympathetic ringing of the open string.

This exercise can also be accomplished using octaves, e.g., the third finger G on the D string sounded alongside the open G string, the third finger D on the A string sounded alongside the open D string, and the third finger A on the E string sounded alongside the open A string.

I put together a simple exercise that displays various combinations of these notes and fingerings to give the student an opportunity to learn about these ringing notes through a systematic exercise or etude:

©Paula E. Bird 2010

I also use various finger patterns as drones, but I'd like to save the drone exercises for future discussions about using finger patterns, because drones are just one example of the types of benefits that one derives from the use of finger patterns.

Although the purpose of the exercises described above is for the development of the student's ear, the exercises also serve another purpose in that they awaken the student to the kinesthetic qualities of the sound as well. When a string sympathetically vibrates alongside a note of the same name, the extra "sparkle" that the student hears is also felt as an extra "umph" of physical vibration to the student's body. When we hold the violin, we are subject to several points of contact between the instrument and the body, and these are points that will connect the vibrations of the pitch to the student's body. I try to alert the student to these other sensations as well as to the pitch so that the student becomes more aware of the kinesthetic feeling of the correct pitch. There are many times in big symphony works when I cannot hear my high note pitches well above the fortissimo brass blow across the orchestra from me. I can still feel the kinesthetic sensation of the pitch vibration in my body through my contact with my violin, and I can still tell that I am in tune with the brass (although perhaps not heard as well).*

One last note relates to something I call "headphone syndrome." I was first alerted to this problem through a publication called Brain Gym: Simple Activities for Whole Brain Learning by Paul E. Dennison, Ph.D. and Gail E. Dennison, published by Edu Kinesthetics (June 1992). You can still find this book on Amazon.com and other places. In a footnote under one exercise, the authors mentioned that some students might have a particularly difficult time hearing well if they have been relying on headphones to a heavy extent. I'm not going into the reasons for this phenomenon, but I will state that I have observed similar difficulties in my teaching experience. Students frequently spend large amounts of their day with headphones or ear buds over or in their ears, so this "syndrome" is more than likely.

I find that one of the exercises mentioned in the book helps to awaken the ears. I call it wakening up the "super ears." Hold your hands out in front of you, palms facing forward. Then while holding that palms-forward position, bring your hands back behind your ears until the hands are behind the ears and the thumbs are in front of the ears. Then gently rub the ears' edges and lobes between the thumb and the other fingers. Start at one end of the ear and work around to the other edge, trying to roll out the curled edge of the ear. The ears will tingle. They will also "come to life." Students seem to hear better, perhaps because they are more aware of their ears. It's a simple exercise, but the ears really get a workout.

If you study the book, you will learn that this exercise has many other added benefits to it in terms of integration between the brain and various other body systems or parts. I highly recommend this book. There are many interesting exercises that would work well in group class settings.

We are coming to the end of the year 2010 although we are only at a midpoint in the school year. Still, I enjoy this time of year when I get a few extra moments to relax and ponder my upcoming year of teaching and playing. I'm sifting through various ideas about goals and enjoying the planning process for addressing my goals.



If I don't have a chance to continue our discussion in the next three days, let me wish "Merry Christmas" to everyone. I'm off to play another "Nutcracker" ballet with the Austin Ballet.
______________________________________
* I'm referring to a few moments that occur in Respighi's "Pines of Rome."


©Paula E. Bird 2010