Suzuki violin

Stories

I think I learned more about teaching and learning from my training as a Suzuki violin teacher than from anything else I have studied.
I first encountered this method as a traditional teacher who took a pair of students who had just moved to town from a big established Suzuki program elsewhere. It astounded me that the mother came to the lesson and wrote down everything I said. They treated each bit of instruction as a gold nugget and got very excited about my suggestions. The following week they showed up having mastered every bit of what I had assigned and were hungry for more. Normal students were nothing like that, in my experience. This family knew how to learn and somehow they had been taught to learn this way. I was fascinated and decided to learn more about the method.
I took teacher training through book four and when I used it in my studio teaching the results were amazing. I learned SO much about how children learn and the importance of play, imitation, preview and review and so very many other things. This happened thirty years ago and I have done a lot of stuff in education since then, but nothing has prepared me to be a teacher as well as those years in Suzuki did.
Now I am a public school teacher and mired in NCLB and the stupidity of teaching to the test. I still use what I learned from Suzuki and later from Orff training as the foundation for how I teach.
I am focused on how children learn rather than on how I teach, or at least I try to be.