Blog #18

2/11/19

I had a interesting mentor visit this week; the students were preparing for solos they have to perform in front of the class, which mostly involves playing along to a recording of the piano part to the solo. Since I couldn’t really do much, I was playing along with the students, trying to help them when I could. We were finishing warming up and moving on to scales, when Mr. Holzer looks at me and says “Do you want to do this?” So I got up and went through the scale with them and it was fine, but Mr. Holzer explained to me later that he was trying to put me on the spot to see how I would do. His reasoning was that while teachers should always have a lesson plan, they still have to improvise a lot, which I hadn’t thought about a lot. I’ve usually have a lesson plan on paper in front of me, or in my mind, but I guess that’s true, not everything goes according to plan, and it’s important to adapt. That’s a good lesson for real life too.