Teaching

3. Teaching (Feb '04)

I just completed my first week of teaching. Hooray! I have about 15 students, with a few more in the wings (harps and wings go together. Along with halos). Six of them are adults, the rest are kids (the youngest is about 7 or 8. Most are 12 to 14). I go into Stornoway on Mondays and Thursdays to teach the bulk of the students, and then on Tuesdays and Wednesday I have four or five who come to my house in Tolstachaolais.

This first week went surprisingly well. All the scheduling worked out in the end, and I somehow instinctively knew what to say to them. Not always. And some students were harder than others (especially the shy ones who don't give much feedback). But for the most part I felt like I was actually teaching and not just faking it. (I had one gear-grinding transition when I got a "low intermediate" student just after an "advanced" student. I had trouble downshifting from "yikes! what the heck can I teach this kid that she doesn't already know, and keep it challenging enough so that she doesn't get bored" to "be patient when she can't find the right chords right away; remember what it was like when all the strings looked the same.")

But for the most part it was an enjoyable, rewarding experience, and will hopefully continue to be so. It certainly helped that I had sat in on Alison's lessons (the teacher who came in from Edinburgh) so I could say to the students "play the tune she taught you" and then comment on it; I didn't have to start from absolute zero.

Speaking of absolute zero, we're having a brief (so they tell me) cold snap. Brrrr. I may have to fleece a sheep or two surreptitiously and stuff the wool down my trousers.

In addition to teaching, I'm also taking a class at the local college. I had planned to take beginning Gaelic, but it was full, and since Justin and Laura were already signed up to take intermediate Spanish on the same night, I decided to go to that with them. It's a fun class, and it's nice to pick up a language that's been dormant for 13 years and improve it, rather than starting another (really, really hard) one from scratch (or as they would spell it in Gaelic, "sbhcraithgearean").

The Spanish teacher is a nice woman with a good sense of humor, about my age, named Angeles (she doesn't play the harp or have wings. But she does have an hola). She's from Spain, and her boyfriend is from Germany, and the three of us went to a Scottish country dance evening last night. We felt very multi-cultural. The dancing was similar to what I did at the Burns' night last week, but more of it. Many of the dances were set dances, with groups consisting of two or four partners all interchanging and swinging around and casting off to the bottom, and going underneath upraised arms, and gently pushing in the right direction those who hadn't a clue where they were supposed to be going, or which partner they were supposed to be swinging round and round. It was made even more challenging by the fact that there were more women than men, so when you were supposed to grab the man's hand of two people hurtling towards and past you, you had to do imagination work (as in, "is this woman really a man?") in addition to memory work (as in, "which direction did I go last time and crash into someone?"). Not that "you" refers to "me," of course. I was brilliant and went exactly where I had to go every time. It was the other seven people in my set who were confused.

Love,
Andrea

Andrea Blumberg