Curiosity in Learning

By Marie Smith, Diggs-Latham Elementary

My service through ArtistCorps exposes me to so many unique and incredible students. I am consistently surprised by how curious and hard-working they are. I love having opportunities to answer my students’ questions and to work through topics of interest to them.

At the end of all of my lessons I ask if there are any questions, or anything I can help them through. After a fun create-your-own technique exercise session, one student told me about a show on PBS that has a catchy theme song and part of it she noticed was played on a horn, so she asked me if we could figure out how to play it. She sang it to me and we worked back and forth to find the right notes and then she learned how to play it. It was so much fun!

She was so genuinely interested and I had the opportunity to reinforce good playing habits while she was learning a tune she really liked. I was also able to slip in a little bit of instruction in transposition (without actually putting a name to it) by suggesting that she could try starting on different notes and figuring out the rest of the ditty since we didn’t know exactly what key it was in. Her desire to learn a tune she knew from a show she loved helped me teach her so much more about horn and music in general than what I had pictured before we started the lesson. 

May 02, 2017