The sugar maple in my front yard has dropped all of its leaves. The tree in my backyard still has 40-60% of its silver maple foliage. Both trees will gracefully face winter, but the backyard tree needs a little more time.
Autumn days raking leaves is a great time to reflect about relationships, friends, jobs, art, family and life. Today, I wondered to myself, “Are you more like the front tree or backyard silver maple?”
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PS: I love that my city of Ann Arbor does a tree inventories.
Today, I’m thinking a lot about Holly High graduates who joined the military and returned to my classroom to share stories of the war with me. My voice is too small to say anything about it except thank you for their service.
My grandfather survived the Battle of the Bulge, but never spoke of it with me. I’m still humbled, still bewildered by the facts of war; but those students who shared stories with me helped me understand my grandfather a little more clearly.
Little victories arise, when we don’t expect them.
My dad introduced me to Leon Russell in 2003. My father noticed Leon Russell was play at the Magic Bag club in Michigan while touring. “Russell used to tour stadiums in the 70s!” my dad said.
It’s taken ten years for my dad’s introduction to Leon Russell to finally have grabbed me. I can’t get enough of these songs!
Leon Russell’s story about how he found his piano playing style is inspiring as well. Leon shared the how he got his style from a setback during an interview with Neil McCormick for The Telegraph:
“[H]e developed a unique style of piano playing, based around a slight paralysis of his right hand from a birth injury. ‘I couldn’t play what was written in front of me. I worked out the notes to fit my hands.’ He was exceptional enough to get session work from his early teens, and relocated to Los Angeles in the Sixties.”
Setbacks lead us to our style.
I told some friends that I was teaching myself piano, and seeking some piano players to offer me a lesson or two. My friend said, “Just use Youtube! You don’t need a teacher.”
This sentence captivates the current misconception about education. We mistake supplemental guides for a replacement of teachers.
At age 19, I was taking guitar lessons with a WMU music major, and my teacher asked, “Do you know about inversions?” I had never heard this musical concept before he asked me. Once he taught it to me in five minutes, it changed my entire playing!
Which leads us to the problem of only using Youtube videos to learn: How would I know how to teach myself this concept if I didn’t know the concept exists?
What a teacher does for a student is offer a guided curriculum, a pathway to success. A teacher opens up doors to new concepts that one might not ever realize on their own.
Last spring, I walked into my friend and fiddle player David Mosher’s house. Two random triangular, three-stringed instruments were sitting on a table.
“What are these, David?” I asked.
“Oh! Those are The balalaikas! Russian instruments from the 1800s,” he said. “I just got them for a Wild Swan performance this month.”
“Do you know how to play them?” I asked.
“I will before the performance,” he said, nonchalantly.
It reminded me: The best way to learn, is to give yourself a project.
