We are still flying high from our workshop weekend with Carrie Reuning-Hummel, a visiting Suzuki violin teacher from Ithaca, New York. We want to extend a big thank you to all of our parents and kids who were able to attend! We hope you got something meaningful out of the weekend and would love to hear what you took away or what you most enjoyed.
I wanted to share my thoughts about the weekend, as I learned so much and took pages and pages of notes!
One big message we felt throughout the workshop was from Carrie’s childhood experiences with Dr. Suzuki, whom she met at age 5 and was able to work with for a short time in Japan at age 15. She recounted that Dr. Suzuki allowed her to feel “seen and known”, and that he had the “opposite of judgement” in his teaching relationship with her. Carrie took this profound feeling with her into her teaching and subsequent Suzuki parenting of her two children. Hearing about her experiences challenges us to try to see our students and children for who they really are. The more we understand about our children in terms of temperament, intensity, etc, the more we can figure out the best way to practice with our children. Carrie has written a helpful book called, A Time To Practice: A Companion for Practice, and recommended a bunch of additional books, including Raising Your Spirited Child, The Passionate Learner, Mindset, The Talent Code, and Point of Power, all of which I am diving into!
At Friday afternoon’s master class, Carrie talked about imagining the student in a years time working on a more difficult piece. She looked for things in his/her technique to adjust that could make playing the more difficult pieces easier.
Overhead at the master class:
“You know who I think the bad guy is? The thumb is kind of pushy!”
“You just found out a new way!”
“Awesome! You’re figuring it out!”
“Let’s add one more thing to our recipe.”
“I’ll do four notes, you do four notes, and let’s see if we sound like the same person.”
“Let’s add more sparkle to your playing.”
More later on the the fun moments shared at the Saturday afternoon Play-In!
