 Teaching Moment of the Week No.1
A socially distanced guitar lesson. An unfortunate student does the old masked-sneeze. Runs out the room with mortified eyes. Blunders back in. New mask, conscientious hand-gelling. The gel squirts – I’m not kidding – ALL the way across the room, maybe 15 feet. Right in my earhole. And I have clinically diagnosed TINY earholes (no word of a lie). I heard the squelch. I squeaked. Well, you would. A look of stupefied realisation flashed across that boy’s face a split second before each of these small catastrophes spun away from him. Teaching Moment of the Week No.2 I teach in a Jewish School. I wear a yarmulke (skull cap) out of respect. In all honesty it’s a habit I’m out of, so I forget some basic principles of how to wear one. Hence my error, when carrying an amp in one hand and a guitar in the other, I didn’t remember the fatal combination of yarmulke, bald head and heavy winds. I felt it lift in the air like it had been shot off the top of my head. The nice caretaker stared boggle-eyed at the whole thing. I swear the yarmulke DISAPPEARED. The nice caretaker helped me look. We found it in a bush. Time to buy some wig glue. Teaching Moment of the Week No.3 Two primary kids have been noodling around on the guitar for a while. I have a “no pressure in the pandemic” policy, so I don’t nag anyone about practising as much as I might. (I promise my telling them that I won’t nag is not the same as nagging them.) We’ve slowly got the shared lesson to a point when they could change from one chord to another, after a long long time playing each chord on its own. I realised they had the chords to YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT. We tried it. It sounded awesome. Now we’ve been playing it every week. One of them told me she listened to it with her mum, using one of those big round black spinny things (don’t I feel old?). They’ve both started playing more. A very worthwhile slow burn. I try. Sometimes I get what I need.
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