New Techniques

Often when I am teaching, I will be explaining something and i'll suddenly be hit with a way to express the idea with brevity and precision. This turns into a new teaching technique that I continue to use. Tonight while teaching my students I was hit with this inspiration twice.

The first happened when I was explaining to a kid, of i believe 7 or 8 years, the basic theory of rests. I was introducing him to the eighth note rest by incorporating it into the kick pattern of a drum beat. I had been struggling with expressing this idea, and tonight it just rolled off my tongue in a way that is clear, concise, and simple.

The second happened when I was teaching the kid's father (yes all three of my students tonight are family to each other). We were warming up with single stroke rolls and the kick on all the downbeats, as usual, and I referred to the idea of starting slow and gradually increasing speed as a 'speed gradient.' This gave me a way to refer to a specific exercising technique which I had previously been explaining each time i did it with a student as "start slow and gradually increase speed then gradually decrease speed." Now all I have to do is define speed gradient to my student, and this opens the door to many applications of the speed gradient.

Coming soon will be LiveScribe lessons. I have a pen that records via an infrared camera everything that I write in the notebook. I can use this as a way to record short little lesson blurbs and post them in my blog. I hope to have a couple up in the next 3 days or so.

\m/