I’m learning to read music! My kids are teaching me to do something I’ve struggled with my entire life, and consequently finely gave up. I will also whole heartedly admit that I have been and am relearning 2nd and 3rd grade math, something I always desperately needed BTW (just ask my Mom!). I learn through my kids, we learn things together. I’m constantly saying “hey, I never knew that!”, or “Hey, I finally get that!”. But music, well, that’s just something I would have gone through the rest of my life without knowing. It was literally Chinese to me, no matter how many teachers, or my mother, tried to teach me. In fact, up until 2 weeks ago my vision would just blur every time my eyes just happen to fall upon a piece of sheet music. I say happen, since there’s no way on this planet that it would have been intentional. But, with my Inventor's burning desire to learn to play the violin coinciding with my Mom teaching Analyzer how to read notes and play the piano, I found myself actually knowing what I was talking about while they practiced. My daughter taught me about Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE - on the keyboard. It was quite amusing, since A. She was truly teaching me something new and B. She was using a real teacher voice. And when I made a mistake, oh boy, out came the “no, no, no, you’re doing this ---but this is what you’re supposed to do”.....oh brother!
Goes to show you, you never know what an old dog can learn! This old dog is certainly *extremely* surprised with herself!
Oh, and yes, the only keyboard we had in the house at the time was that little Barbie one. But it was good enough!
Learning
And I don’t mean sitting down with books and a pen and paper. I mean, *real* learning. That means first having an idea come to mind of something you want to do, find out about, or accomplish. Then, figure out how you’re going to go about doing it. Enlist any help you *may* need. And finally, have at it. Spend time doing that learing/perfecting/accopmlishing.
Analyzer specifically, has taught me this lesson. Time after time I’ve watched her go through this process. She’ll pick a skill, be it a hand stand or an essay (and yes, she has of her own free will decided to write essays about various people and/or things). She’ll determine her path to learning, then, she’ll spend day after day, sometimes for hours and hours a day ‘getting it’ or getting it done. She's done this with figure skating, handstands, piano playing, singing and writing. Given the time, freedom and permission to do their own thing, kids can accomplish some amazing things.
Just to be clear, I’m not a total unschooler. I have my share of ‘oh my gosh’ moments when I panic about their so called academic accomplishments. We do have certain things we actualy sit down and do on a regular basis (those include math, reading and some foreign language). I know this is just my paranoia leading the way here though. I know that if I let go of our more structured ways in these areas, things will workout fine. I know that, to a certain extent, yet I still find my self gravitating back to it. Maybe some day I’ll overcome that need, hopefully sooner rather than later. But for now, it's working for us.
The way I see it we live everyday only once. There's that thing called life we keep trying to do, in the midst of ‘studies’. I tell myself (and I truly believe) there's always time to catch up on spelling and such, but life, only happens once. Once that day is gone, it's gone. Spelling, can happen tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.... As long as everyone’s happy, we’re good. No point torturing anybody, including myself.
47, 48, 49, 40, 41, 42, 43, NO!, 50, 51, 52, 53, etc.....
Correcting him almost popped out of my mouth, it’s just so automatic. But I’m so glad I controlled myself and didn't! Something so much better happened, he caught the mistake by himself and self corrected. Now THAT bit of info will sink in much more than if I had said, “hey, what comes after 49? Is it 40 or....?”. Finding your mistakes on your own gives you two things. First and more obvious I think is the rethinking process that happens when you know what you did or said was wrong. Rethinking is such an important cognitive tool that most of us utilize way to little. But second, and maybe even more important, is the self reflection that is a prerequisite to that self correction.
What to do on a slow Sat. afternoon.....6.26.10
Why, build a violin of course! It’s amazing what inspirations they come up with when left to their own devices. Really. From being bored, to picking up a book about musical instruments, to deciding, hey, I want to build a violin! Mom, can you find me some cardboard please? Why, yes son, I do believe we have about a gazillion boxes in the house right now, so sure, have at one! Tear it apart! Now, the challenge, as they just discovered is “where do we get horse hair from??” I bet they’ll figure that one out too......
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