What I learned in April

April 30, 2015 / 3 Comments

  • I was reading the news the other morning and randomly, completely randomly, discovered that an article about a girl in Wausau who nailed a perfect score on the ACT was really a story about one of my favorite and most brilliant piano students ever, a little girl I loved teaching while we lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin.  Her mother was also a resident, a colleague of Dr. Peds, and this girl and her sister were fun and amazing.  Their parents were from India, and both of the girls just loved learning.  They were great readers and storytellers, approaching everything with enthusiasm and animation. They were also able to focus on difficult things, and what always impressed me so much was how they knew about things from a global perspective.  Their parents made sure they knew what was happening all over the world.  It was so fun to see this student grown up and learn that she was brilliant still.
  • I learned how to hold the bow of my cello correctly.  Again.  For what might be the eighth time.  Sigh. 
  • I learned six new songs for the cello.  I learned where to place my left elbow, and about bow distribution and how to apply it to the music I am working on.  I learned about second position and how to make an extension to get to it.
  • The very first pencils were designed with a hexagonal shape specifically so that they didn’t roll off the table or desk.
  • I learned some of the history and possible symbolism of the nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”
  • Sometimes, especially lately, reading the news has made me fearful.  Some of the terrible things happening around the world make my stomach churn and worry me.  I’ve even considered not reading the news so I can live in blissful ignorance, but that just didn’t seem right.  It seems good to know about what is happening, even if it’s terrible.  One of the biggest things I took away from  our church’s mission conference this year was that a Biblical perspective shines light on our enemies.  Even those people we greatly fear, for very good reason  are people loved by God.  Instead of thinking of them as an “enemy,” and worrying about what they might do,  we really need to ask how we can show love to them.  I felt like a lot of things that were bothering me suddenly made sense all at once.
  • I learned two new Chopin preludes for the piano.  (Op. 24).
  • At the end of our audiobook Charlotte’s Web, there is a little segment about E.B. White and his process as a writer.  For some reason I had never listened to this before we drove back from North Dakota.  It was fascinating to learn how White revised his writing, and how some of the most enchanting passages of Charlotte’s Web started out sounding completely different than the final version.

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