A List of Learning

These days I more often than not find myself in a state of survival, taking one task at a time and completing and not having a lot of spare time for things other than sleeping.  However, if I were suddenly gifted with a large quantity of spare time, I do have a number of things I would like spend some time learning in depth:

• I’d really like to learn German.  Yes, I know that I am past the age of learning a language without a terrible accent, but I’m not past the age of actually learning to speak another language.  I love languages, actually, and loved learning Spanish in high school.  Spanish was the only language that I had an opportunity to study in high school, and we learned through an interactive learning program broadcast on public television and then had appointment times with a native speaking tutor that we called on the telephone to make sure we were progressing.  I actually loved the format and clear teaching of the program.  When I went to college I actually planned on getting a Spanish minor to fit into my education degree, but after one semester of working with the TERRIBLE Spanish professor who had no idea what he was doing, I abandoned that idea, knowing I’d never become fluent enough under that professor to actually be able to teach Spanish, and I switched over to English education to go along with music education.  Anyway, I always really wanted to learn German, and it turns out it would have served me better than Spanish anyway, because not only did I end up traveling to Germany twice, but  I’m forever having to sing in German, and I can figure it out with the International Phonetic Alphabet, but some fluency in the language would really come in handy.  Someday I’d like to spend some serious time with a program like Rosetta Stone or something like that and gain a better understanding of German.
• Dalcroze Eurythmics is a philosophy of understanding rhythms and musical expression through movement.  It makes so much sense and I’d love to have a certification in it so I’d get better at using it in my teaching and my own music making.
• Do you know how much I would be able to use a music therapy degree?!?  Tons.  I wish it were free and didn’t take four years of voracious study to learn.
• I’d really like to understand the grammar and sentence structure of American Sign Language.
• I’d love to really know how to play the organ, along with a lot of other musical instruments that I would like to be more fluent at.
• It’s not technically learning, maybe, but I’d love to belong to a writing group and a book club again.  In the past, both were such enriching experiences for me.
• I’ve been having so much fun reviewing difficult music for piano that I had learned years ago and sort of put aside for various reasons, one of which being that it was just frustrating to play on an instrument that wasn’t quite suited for the sounds of the music.  I’ve also been learning new difficult music bit by bit.  My big projects have been some works by Mussagorsky and Rachmaninoff, as well as some Debussy, Grieg and Granados.  I have lots of ideas lined up for future projects.  Although I don’t have big blocks of time like I used to, I’m feeling good about using little snatches of time, because sometimes that’s how learning difficult music happens for me:  in little snatches.  I had forgotten that, actually, and Ive been excited to rediscover this idea and stop feeling bad about not having big chunks of time for practicing.  Regardless, I am definitely enjoying my piano these days, and all the learning taking place there.