Week 11 continued: 11/2/11 It is Wednesday and I arranged with my piano student Melissa to do our final filming of our piece together with me using the pedals on the organ. I tried to find a book on the organ, but only found a book that was publiched in 1957 and is very technical and not for lay people like me. I think I need "The Organ for Dummies". I will look again and hopefully I will find a better book on how to use the organ stops and how to use the pedals. In the meantime, I will continue to learn after this journal is handed in because this is a topic that I want to improve in my life. It has significance to me and that is what motivates a student to want to learn. As teachers we must strive to make learning relevant to our children's lives. This is a great responsibility and a difficult task. The fact that there are so many varied personalities with varied wants and interests is a challenge to any teacher.
Joy and I went over to the church at 4:00 and I practiced for an hour and then Melissa was able to come. We practiced for another 45 minutes and then Joy filmed us playing for another 30 minutes. It has my feet coming in nicely at the end. Much better than the practice that we did on week 6. I have improved. I have learned to put the pedals into the end of the piece. I need to keep working on learning the pedals for the rest of the song. It does not come easily to me. I am a bit uncoordinated apparently, but I can learn. Just like all students can learn, so can I. I will keep practicing to gain the automaticity that is required at the organ. It is a lot of work to learn something new. As teachers it is good for us to realize the struggle. Hopefully this assignment will make us more simpathetic to our little learners for we have a renewed personal knowledge of how difficult learning something new can be.
Thank you, Dr. Carr for this class and this assignment. I feel I gave it my best effort. I practiced two or more hours most weeks. I definitelly learned that learning something new is a challenge. We need to make our learning environment as appealing and conducive to learning as possible for this is not an easy task we ask of these children. In Chapter 3 we learned about creating a learning focused classroom. I hope to create this in my class. I hope to make coming to school worthwhile, a place that children want to come to. I will be understanding when learning something new is difficult, but I will have high expectations also and then scaffold them to be able to achieve the desired end result. THE END
