The Children's School of Music is pretty awesome. I am easily the worst pianist (to be fair, I have never taken music lessons outside of school, and wasn't even in band...) This frustrates me, because I like to be the best at everything. I feel like it's very important to be prepared and work my hardest at what I do - I partially learned it working Outdoor Ed... being obsessively prepared with a million and one things to do when things go wrong. It's important when you work with kids.
The problem is, my musical "bag of tricks" is so much smaller than my teambuilding or nature hiking ones. I had a great time working Nature Day Camp, was confident and awesome because I had so much experience. Music is a much more technical thing, and being enthusiastic and good with kids isn't enough. I have always had the background knowledge in nature and cultural history - add literature, and you have my passions. My musical knowledge is much more organic, and I am a little frightened that I will accidentally give a kid the wrong information.
I think my niche here is going to be in recruiting and running the young children's programs/music on the go programs. I find my confidence and skills with infants and toddlers is already skyrocketing compared to what it was (I definitely was not a baby fan prior to this job), and the more I do it, hopefully the better I get. We teach them the building blocks of rhythm and tone... but hopefully I can do more. If I can teach kids to love music, to have fun with music... and then the more experienced musicians can give them the knowledge they need.
That's my plan anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment