Lesson Reflection

I think that I was more nervous than I had ever been in my life before I did my 10-minute lesson.  I struggled greatly trying to come up with a lesson plan.  Honestly, most of my time “preparing” was actually just spent trying to come up with a good idea.  I finally thought of something that I could do, and went with it.  Doing a lesson on fugues was one of my original ideas, but if it hadn’t been for finding that color visualization video on YouTube, I’m almost sure I would have settled on something else.  My big issue with the idea was trying to present it in a clear, easy to understand way, and that video really helped me do that.

            My stress was building throughout the weekend, and it peaked right before Dale started his lesson, and I found out that I was going to be second.  I sat in my chair with my head down, nearly in tears.  It was a bit strange.  I’ve performed music probably thousands of times in all different environments.  I don’t even have a major fear of talking in front of crowds general.  Yet this was different somehow.  I think the main reason why was because I was unsure that what I had prepared was going to work.  I suppose I felt a bit underprepared.  This is despite having shared and practiced my lesson over the weekend with my wife and my parents.  They all were very encouraging, and said I would do great, but I just didn’t believe them, because that’s the negative attitude I tend to have.  I think another reason why I was so nervous was because along with the conducting assignment I had to do two days later for a different class, this was the most relevant thing I had been given to do in graduate school yet.  I wanted to take it seriously and hopefully do a good job.

            When I started, I had pulled myself together, and I was no longer nervous.  One of the things I was most unsure of was the beginning of the lesson.  I felt pretty good about the idea of having the class sing a round, but I hadn’t completely crystallized how I was going to do it in terms of what words I would use to get them to start.  Overall, I was pretty happy how the whole initiation part turned out.

            Having someone from class come up and play the piano was a last minute change I made.  I was intending on playing it myself.  I’m an extremely poor piano player, but I had practiced that part enough so that I was fairly comfortable with it.  In the end though, I thought it would be better to have a student do it because it was another way for the class, or at least someone from the class to be doing something instead of the teacher.  I thought, anything to make it more like a lesson and less like a lecture.  I’m glad I made this decision, because I think it worked just fine. 

            Making sure it wasn’t a lecture was possibly the number one concern I had, and was most likely the thing that made it so hard to come up with an idea.  Everything that was popping into my head just involved information, and me talking.  I knew that the ideal lesson would involve the students doing some sort of activity most of the time rather than just sitting and listening to a teacher talk to them.  Ideally, the activity would involve them playing music.  As much as I tried to fight against lecturing, I ultimately failed. 

Mr. Schneider rightfully pointed out in his comments that I was indeed starting to lecture, and that I was introducing too many terms.  After discussing it with him, and doing some more thinking about it myself, I think I’ll be able to come up with some ways of making the lesson more student-centered for next time.