OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Breaking Up is Hard to Do…

August 1st, 2007

I broke up with my kids’ violin teacher today. Not that I was seeing her socially, exactly. But then it felt really personal. No chance we’re still friends. I tried so hard to be diplomatic and express gratitude and respect while explaining we need something else right now. I had had a fantasy of going in for a final lesson with her (already paid for!) on Saturday with cards the kids had made and flowers, giving them a chance to say goodbye. But she’s very much convinced her way is the only way, and lay quite a trip on how I was betraying her and how much she has invested in me and my children (hey, I was the one writing checks!), and every point I had about what wasn’t working for me she argued prolifically, until I was left with a weak “yeah, I guess that’s how you see it.” But she was upset I hadn’t brought any of this up earlier, that it seemed so sudden… I hate that feeling of having something sprung on you, and yet, over the course of this last year, seldom has she seemed to actually hear me. I felt completely run over.

Still, over the last year, she’s let me know who she was. I do think her method works, but it was getting harder to cope with her style of dealing with children, with me. So today, I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths, convinced that this was the right thing for my kids, that they haven’t been consigned to never getting a good technique, that this phone call today actually proved that I made the right decision. After I came not-so-suddenly to the conclusion last Saturday that I couldn’t continue another semester with her, I have been losing sleep about having to tell her (and it seemed inappropriate to write even this publicly about it when I hadn’t talked to her. And I am trying not to go into a litany of what didn’t work and what was making me crazy). So I am looking forward to resting better tonight, knowing that I did the right thing, was honest and honorable and forthright and, for me, darn assertive.

Astonishing how much of my identity had gotten caught up in being a parent in her studio, knowing my place in the hierarchy there (we were going to have some seniority this year, dammit!) and how once that broke and all of the ripples of implication settled down, I felt lighter and a little freer.

Mi hermana, the wise ‘cello teacher, reminds me that this is a business transaction. She was shocked when I described the length of the conversation. Why didn’t I just say, “I’m sorry, this is the decision we’ve made. Thanks for your time.”? I’ll never be that person, I’m afraid.

Plus side: we had another lesson this evening with a different teacher, who teaches one of my son’s classmates, and he impressed me. He listened thoughtfully, had a style very much “This is great. One thing you could do to make it better is try it this way.” In fact, he seemed to be using a lot of the scripts I’ve heard from my sister in her teaching, which is my highest standard. And the eight year old responded terrifically. With the four-year-old, he managed a pretty good balance between listening respectfully, and keeping him on track. Which, considering the astonishing free association the child is capable of, was quite impressive. He laid out clear goals for the next lesson: the most important thing to work on is this, when I come next I am going to ask to hear this. My biggest fear was that I was going to be sacrificing some of the exacting learning-the-right-way-not-developing-bad-habits-muscle-memory that was the old teacher’s hallmark, and yet he was exacting about the hand-shaping and posture and holds he wanted from my son, and had new and different ways of explaining it, and I don’t feel like we’ve compromised.

I don’t think he’s the rebound teacher, and I don’t think the last year was wasted. And I think I won’t be tied up in knots trying to interpret things said off the cuff that have nothing to do with the violin. It’s a tricky thing about Suzuki, because it does have to do with the whole child and how the child is being raised. It works best in the place where their work is play and their play is their work and discipline and coaching and the relationships between parent and child, teacher and child, and parent and teacher are all in a good balance. But I know how to raise my children, have agonized over the decisions of when to push them, when to refrain from pushing, when to try and ask a little more of them — whether it’s in helping around the house or sitting quietly through a performance or tasting a vegetable that they are convinced they hate — and when to save my energy for the bigger battles, and these things are my privilege and my responsibilty as the parent, and what I really want from a violin teacher is really lessons in violin playing right now.

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