In the spring of 2022, inspried by the ‘Project 50’ trend on instagram and tiktok, I commited myself to posting reels.

I develped the following plan…
Jan – lifestyle reels
Feb – full lessons in 30s
Mar – information reels
Apr – repetition reels
May – timelapse/student develpment reels
June – lesson moments

If you go explore my instagram page you will find them hidden in ‘reels.’

Because the reels were only 15-60 seconds long and could be edited on my phone I was able to work on them frequently and get many out per month.

This exercise transformed the way I related to instagram and, ultimately, vulnerability.

Let me explain. As a young teacher it is easy to feel uncomfortable about sharing your work with the world. You are just getting your feet on the ground. You are teaching many transfer students. You are younger than the parents you are working with. You haven’t had much practice. Yikes.

For that reason I found I was shying away from publishing my student’s playing and my own teaching online. Because I was posting so infrequently, every post felt like a big deal. Because I felt like every post was important I became attached to every like and comment.

I figured that if I just put more out there– if I normalized my own daily posting– then I could build a protective shield of my own work around me. A comment or like would just bounce off of the work itself. If a post went out with few likes it wasn’t a big deal, because I was in the long game, doing it for myself, building an archive of my own teaching brick my brick.

Don’t get me wrong, the comments and likes were appreciated. But they weren’t the reason I was posting.

I felt like this level of daily vulnerability and iteration in public prepared me to submit my Suzuki Principles in Action coursework, my Certificate of Achievement application, gather my teacher trainer application materials, and press upload to my YouTube channel. The practice gave me more opportunities to view myself teach and then think of myself in third person while I was teaching. I honed workflows for recording, filing, and uploading from a variety of cameras and microphones. Ultimately, the regularity of posting also left more breadcrumbs for summer institutes and workshop teachers to find my work and invite me to teach at their institutions.

Though getting going on instagram can feel like a vanity project at first, the exercise of turning instagram into an archive and publishing as much as possible, in practice, did the opposite for me. It tamed my ego and freed me to teach the child in front of me.

I recommend you try it for yourself.

Over the summer of 2021, after teaching at the Ithaca Institute, I created something for myself called cave week. The idea was that I would restrict all external noise, enter an internal cave for the week, and use my time to create what I was calling my album. I’m writing this on March 6, 2022 and the album still isn’t finished, however it is in progress. I want to provide an excerpt of my journals that week just so you can see how hard the act of thinking really is.

It is possible to get by as a teacher by simply regurgitating a haphazard, half digested collection of what other teachers have discovered. I am convinced that in order to be a teaching master you must actually start from scratch. You must build a coherent, self-referential system that will completely support your students. Don’t think of yourself as a collector of others’ good ideas, but as an architect of your own.

But what does it feel like to architect? It feels like this…

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The internet works at scales of infinity. Frictionless Infinitude.

Examples.
Jacob Collier.
Dream SMP.
“Welcome to the Internet”

What do we do when infinity is infinitely available?
We value what is scarce.
Analog, void, one pointed. This is now the cultural fronteir.

Violinists need some more infinity.
Infinity needs some more violinists.

A discription is infinitely less effective than the thing itself. We asks our students to submerge themselves in the aural environment of the Suzuki recordings because they can learn more from the recordings than we could ever hope to teach them.

This logic has been applied to student and parent observation of lessons and group class. I think this is a relatively standard practice for beginning families in most Suzuki schools.

I took the same logic and applied it to practice.

When has a student ever seen someone practice violin before? When has a parent seen what it looks like for a child and parent to practice together? What does it particularly look like for a child IN YOUR STUDIO to practice throughout the week?

I became obsessed with creating a reference recording of practice.

I took advantage of the technology of the time– Zoom– to visit the practice sessions of families in my studio to collect footage.

I put together the videos, a brief summary that foregrounded the wisdom of the parents really in it, and then presented this at a parent talk earlier this year.

Here is our initial reference recording. I have many more ideas about how to continue to build out this concept, but this talk was the start.

Please enjoy.