Sharing from Mei Yee's music class 3

The comment and thoughts of personal violin lesson

Brief Description of the personal violin lesson:

In order to join the orchestra in UPM in 2010, I have learnt violin from Miss Liew at the Joyful Music Centre at Serdang. I will share my first violin lesson in this paper. In my first violin lesson, I have learnt how to hold the violin and the bow, also the simple bowing techniques. Miss Liew taught me the basis on violin by demonstrating the steps to hold the violin and bow. After that, she wanted me to try and fix my gesture to the correct one step by step. I can remember that the violin was very difficult to hold by clipping it in between with using the left neck and the shoulder; therefore Miss Liew gave me some time to get used to the gesture. She used a metaphor to explain the gesture of right hand while holding the violin bow. She described the hand gesture was same with the Spider man’s hand gesture while spewing the nets. Then she imitated the hand gesture of Spider Man in spewing without holding anything first, and asked me to do the same gesture. After the steps, she let me to hold the violin bow with the correct hand gesture. Before the class ended, she taught me to do the bowing exercises in the correct way and gave me some homework to do during my own practicing time.      

Comment:

The correct gesture of holding the bow is very important for a beginner student, as the wrong gesture in holding the bow will affect the performance of the student in the future. Also, the wrong gesture in bowing might cause hand injury.  Miss Liew had showed a good example in teaching the gesture. For instance, She corrected my wrong gesture of holding the bow several lessons until I have mastered the correct gesture. Besides, she explained me the hand gesture by describing it in using metaphor, and let me to imagine the gesture first before holding the bow. In the aspect of effective teaching step, the steps above are very important to help the student to understand and imagine the playing techniques first before playing the violin. Moreover, from this step I knew that a good teacher should know how to convey the message in effective way.