Second Lesson Reflection

I recently had take 2 of my ten minute lesson on Bach.  I did the lesson on fugues just as I did the first time.  When the ten minutes was up, my first thought was:  “That was horrible.”  It didn’t feel great while I was doing it, and it felt even worse in the couple of minutes afterword when I reflected on it.  When my time was up I quickly packed up my things and went to my computer.  I didn’t write my actual reflection then.  Rather I just wrote the first few things that came to mind.  This was what I wrote:

Did a worse job

Messed up the color

Not clear

Crappy teacher

Got distracted by people laughing

When I hear someone say it’s making them nervous that can’t be a good sign

Obviously I’m hard on myself, but this was truly how I felt.  I was very nervous before my first lesson, but it ended up going alright, and I was ultimately proud of myself for getting through it.  This time though, I felt it was a borderline disaster.

The main thing I wanted to change was to make the lesson a little simpler in the sense that I wanted fewer facts.  I really wanted to focus on what a subject was and what the exposition was, and to not get bogged down with getting too much deeper.  The first time around I definitely talked too much, so I wanted to have a bit more of the class doing something.  One idea that I decided to try sort of at the last minute was to teach the class the subject vocally.  I had them sing it back to me in a few different sections and then had them sing the whole thing.  I realized that this was going to be a big challenging because it’s a fairly complicated melody to have to memorize on the spot like that, but I thought it was worth giving a try anyways.  The main thing I wanted to accomplish was for the class to get the subject in their head and become familiar with it.  It didn’t really matter to me if they couldn’t sing it perfectly.  I also decided to bring my bass guitar because that’s the instrument that I’m most comfortable with.  (My piano abilities are extremely limited).  I also wanted to play the beginning of the fugue with a student rather than just have them play the subject on his or her own.  This went all right, but I embarrassingly messed up a couple of notes because I let some of the laughter and comments of the rest of the class distract me and throw me off. 

            The other change I made was to split the class up into four groups for the listening/visualization part.  Rather than having everyone simply call out the color that was playing the subject, I assigned a color/voice to each group and had that group stand up when they saw/heard the subject.  Unfortunately I mixed up the color of the tenor voice with the alto voice, which led to confusion.  We tried the exercise again, but I felt it was too late to try and correct the colors at that point, so it only went moderately better the second time.  One interesting thing that happened was that everyone started singing their part along to the video.  I let it continue, and I’m still undecided if this was good or bad.  By singing were they getting more or less out of it?  Were they doing it seriously or as a joke?

            Overall the whole thing just felt uncomfortable to me.  I thought my tendency to be inarticulate came out, and I got a few laughs the first time, which didn’t happen this time.  Thinking about it now, I think getting people to laugh a little bit is a useful way for me to feel a little more comfortable.  I guess it’s a way of realizing that the people I’m talking to are really listening to me and are semi interested.  However, the only way for me to really use humor is for it to be spontaneous.  Quite often when people laugh at things I say it’s borderline unintentional.  In any case it didn’t happen at all this time.

            As I watched and participated in the other lessons I started to feel even worse about how my lesson went.  I thought for the most part everyone else did a great job and showed a lot of improvement on their first lesson.  On the other hand it felt to me like I took a step back.  It’s too bad because I thought all of the changes I made to my plan were quite good.  It’s just that it didn’t really come out when I was actually doing it.  

Luckily I didn’t have to wallow in my own self-criticism.  Professor Schneider actually gave me some very positive comments and told me that it was a big improvement compared to the first lesson.  Not only that, but I even got some nice feedback from a few of the other students in class.  This was very nice to hear.  It says to me that sometimes I really shouldn’t trust myself.  Maybe I did a better job than I gave myself credit for.  I did do a good job with stream lining the lesson, I got everyone singing more and doing a bit more, and I got everyone to learn the subject of a Bach fugue.  I still can’t change how it felt to me, but I suppose that in the end I did improve on my initial lesson.  Regardless of how well or bad it went, doing these lessons as well as seeing other people’s lessons has been a valuable experience.  I look forward participating in the rest of my classes’ lessons on Monday