encouragement for string teachers Archives

2025-01-302025-02-08

Community and language in string teaching

We have a tremendous responsibility toward the community (besides providing the professionally-delivered solid basics and technical expertise) to be loving and caring toward our students' perceptions, experiences and needs.

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2022-06-092022-06-23

Strings and the pandemic in Suzhou

Being a strings teacher in China during the pandemic - playing and waiting and online teaching and we still aren't done

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2021-12-172022-01-13

Tone III

There is another aspect to tone that heavily influences and even overshadows the previous two essays. As a string teacher advocate, I will now focus on how we can nudge ourselves into becoming better teachers by becoming aware of the tone in our life. There is a way in which we go about our day-to-day …

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2021-09-232021-09-23

Tone Part II

Tone has another side that’s too often missed, hence this post. (Part I is the previous post on this blog.) What happens when we dictate everything we want as teachers for the student, and don’t notice our own tone in the process? What happens when we demand things from the parents of our students if …

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2020-06-132020-06-13

String teaching during COVID-19, June 2020

It's already the 13th day of June, 2020, in an undeniably extraordinary year. This year will probably be named 'hindsight', as in, "Hindsight is twenty-twenty." I don't know about you, but it's up and down like a roller coaster from my point of view. There is still plenty to be totally glad about and a …

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2020-03-232020-03-26

String teacher progress in uncertain times

String teachers carry on in uncertain times, giving comfort to students and helping families with a sense of normalcy in going on with their learning.

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2018-09-022024-12-11

Strengthen our own inner voices

Learn to ignore negative opinions.

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2018-03-012021-02-25

GET WITH THE JA

Sort out the "gah" and get with the "ja!" Wait, what? Get rid of the extraneous and keep on going with what's great, that's what that means. How could that possibly be relevant to us, as string-instrument teachers or learners? Well for me personally, it recently meant a commitment to solving something that last year …

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