Hello everyone! I am going to be using this blog to talk about the instrument I play; the viola. I am going to talk about why I chose to play it, and still do, what I like about it, a little on it's history, and how to play. In this first blog post I am going to be giving a little background and introduction on myself.
I started taking viola lessons in fourth grade. Back then I was not really invested in the instrument the way I am now, I was just learning how to play. About seven other students and myself took viola lessons, and I am the only one out of those six or seven children that still play viola today, and I have almost made a career out of it. The initial reason I chose to take viola lessons is very simple. About halfway through fourth grade all the music teachers came and gave a presentation on different instruments they were offering lessons in. I knew I wanted to play a string instrument, but to me as a child, there wasn't a clear difference between Viola and Violin, they looked and sounded the same to me. The reason I decided to take Viola lessons is because all the other students who were contemplating taking music lessons were all planning on taking Violin lessons. And I didn't want to be like everyone else!
In middle school I had a few bad experiences in and out of music. I got bullied a lot in middle school(which didn't really help my creativity in general), and my viola instructor was very rude and unprofessional. I don't want to say "He was mean!" but that's pretty much what I'm saying. He wasn't helpful in furthering my understanding and interest in my instrument and I also just generally didn't have a good time in middle school.
High school is where I really fell in love with the viola and realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life playing it. It was there I met Sarah Jordan, who succeeded where my middle school instructor had failed. She taught me how to take the viola seriously, apply music theory, and convince me that becoming a music teacher wasn't as far fetched of a goal as people made it out to sound.
This is a song I played in High School. That obviously isn't me playing.
After college I really want to be a music teacher. I would prefer teaching either little kids, like preschool/ kindergarten age, or high school students. This is because of multiple reasons. If you get a teaching license you're good to teach from K-12. Elementary school children who are taking instrument lessons, usually don't last that long for the most part. Maybe they become uninterested in the instrument, or thought it to be too challenging for them. Or maybe their parents wanted them to take lessons and they didn't really want to. Middle school students are at an age where their surrounded by so much stimulus and aren't sure what to do with it. Middle school students taking instrument lessons are usually distracted by a lot of outside sources and never really too focused solely on their music.
High school students taking music lessons are typically taking music lessons because it's something they're passionate about. Music is something they want to pursue after high school, maybe even building a career off of it. That is why I would prefer to teach high school students because they are more task focused and prone to enjoy practicing and studying music. And preschoolers literally do not know anything about music yet, so whatever I teach them about music is exactly that. They are learning information about music that I taught them for the first time in their lives. Granted if I hadn't told them, they would probably learn it somewhere else, but if I can educate and inspire someone passing on my knowledge of music to them, that's why I want to be a teacher.
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