by Danielle Corbett

Created on: November 09, 2008

Teaching the violin, or any string instrument, can be a gratifying or a disappointing experience. Usually it is both at the same time.

Good teachers are not always the best players and great players are not always good teachers. After your first lesson, you as the teacher will soon find which category you actually reside in. Most people choose the third option of becoming a child psychologist after teaching their first lesson. Which is fine, but you have to realize you are the one who needs a few rounds of treatment before you can help others. What usually creates such a shift in profession is when a person teaches an ensemble of fourth graders in an after school string program. Not many can fathom finding an entity that can challenge the energy of a young college student who can easily dance the entire night away at a fave nightclub and waltzes into music theory class the next day without a dent in their program? This is where your learning curve as a teacher begins. The answer to this question is a group of fourth graders.

Fourth graders are not the easily fatigued students you think they should be after their eight hours of schooling. Eight hours of classical schooling builds up enough potential energy in their small bodies, making it impossible for any teacher to detonate (I personally think this is a result of the public school fluoride program). In addition, always within your group you will find at minimum two students with ADHD to grapple with in testing your mettle. The easiest way to calm down these active bodies is to teach them something they do not know- scales. Scales are the universal sleeping elixir. Unfortunately for you, the type of scales a fourth grader can play are composed of only three to four notes, so your bliss may not last too long. On the flip-side, the students will understand that you mean business. The child with ADHD usually takes down another child without ADHD into their flight of fancy. After a few classes you will learn to understand that if only one child goes down with the ADHD student as their prisoner of war and not the entire class, that is considered a successful day at work. Eventually the other kids end up ignoring the ADHD student because they really want to learn how to play "Jingle Bells" at least some point in time before Christmas comes around.

Older students tend to be emotional downers, opposite of your ADHD class of elementary students. Older students are usually depressed because they have suffered a day of

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