Nurtured By Love Suzuki Pdf Free Download
Rebecca Astrup
He shares so many different ideas for nurturing children through love that there is no easy way to summarize this book. Thus my book review today will go through many of his main ideas that I found truly inspiring or thought provoking. I hope this will encourage you to discover a new interest in the philosophy and pedagogical materials developed by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki.
I loved how humble Dr. Suzuki was about his enormous success and his students. He shares experiences with WWII and when he was very sick that taught him to treasure life, not money or fame. Rather than push to only develop concert musicians, Dr. Suzuki worked to develop a beautiful character in all of his students.
Whitney Hawker, NCTM, teaches group and private piano at Weber State University, Utah. She loves surprising students with the perfect piece or a new exciting game! After graduate school, she missed sharing ideas and resources daily with colleagues so she and her friend, Spring, began blogging together at 4DPianoTeaching.com
The Suzuki Method is a rich musical philosophybased on the life work of Dr. Shinichi Suzuki. As I come close to the end of myfirst year of studying Suzuki Pedagogy at the University of Denver, I havefound myself reflecting on several significant points of the Suzuki methodwhich have not only nurtured me as a person, but also shaped me as a musicianand teacher.
The Origin of Talent Education. .. just liked children, that was all. And besides that, I hadbeen inflamed by Tolstoy; I had learned to realize how precious children of four and five were,and wanted to become as one of them. They have to thought of self-deception. They trust peopleand do not doubt at all. They know only how to love, and know not how to hate. They love
In 1945, Suzuki began his Talent Education movement in Matsumoto, Japan shortly after the end of World War II. Raising children with "noble hearts" (inspired by great music and diligent study) was one of his primary goals; he believed that people raised and "nurtured by love" in his method would grow up to achieve better things than war. One of his students during this post-1945 period was violinist Hidetaro Suzuki, no relation, who later became a veteran of international violin competitions (Tchaikovsky, Queen Elizabeth, Montreal International) and then the longtime concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. (Hermann, 1981)
Our goal is to foster a community of learning, love, appreciation and respect for music, and to promote early childhood intellectual, cultural and character development through the teaching philosophy of Talent Education.
well, love it or loathe it there is one crucial point that has to be acknowledged. It has, in my opinion, done a great deal to raise the standard of teaching young children by making available to any teacher a n approach which can be discussed /ahared with thousands of other teachers under a reasonably profesisonal looking umbrella. Such a resource is very significant and does much to raise the standards of less competent/confident teachers of young children.
For the record, I've seen both ends of it. I started on "Suzuki" in jr. High, didn't learn to really read till about 10th grade, and got to college thinking I was good as a book 5 player with rotten technique, redeemed only by my natural musicality. However, having taken the teacher training, I can tell you that that may be using the books but that is not Suzuki Method. What's been written above by erica and others are much more apt descriptions of suzuki as suzuki designed it. (For the record I am not a suzuki teacher as such, and probably never will be just due to personal preference and style, but I have taken two levels of training and have learned a ton that I do apply to my own teaching)
Lisa, you may be right that things might have been different if we'd started earlier. But I waited until my daughter expressed interest in playing the violin on her own. I didn't want to choose it for her and impose it on her. She said on her own that she wanted to play the violin when she was about 6 3/4. And then we started lessons. She turned 7 soon afterwards, and yes, she's always been independent and what some parenting experts call "spirited." This may make her a good lawyer, or journalist, or any number of other professions that she's interested in. But it didn't make her a good Suzuki violinist. While it's great that there are more kids getting involved in violin at young ages, I do sometimes wonder what the cost of that is. I think the Suzuki need to start early does effectively shut out the late bloomers, or at least shunts them to different, "alternative" musical paths that aren't what we conceive of as classical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--I love "alternative" musical paths and styles--but by requiring a particular speed of development and childhood temperament for success in classical music, it does shape the world of classical musicians in a particular way.
I remember that in this old thread, you were surprised that adults are in Suzuki anything. I can attest that revised Suzuki method works wonderfully for me. I have been working with three excellent teachers. When it became painfully obvious that it's not sustainable, I decided to stick with the most "Suzuki" of the three, and just go to the other two for occasional consultations. If my aspiration were to become a professional violinist (:p), then my decision might be different, but Lisa just makes lessons more fun and inspires me to practice more. As a highly analytical person myself, I can identify with the other two more, but I love her spontaneousness and instinctiveness, which I have little. She also sees the big picture rather than just drills in technique. That doesn't mean that her students are deficient in technique - she brought me to where I am right now, and the other two teachers couldn't believe that I have only been playing for 2.5 years, despite all the physical difficulties I have. I attend group lessons with kiddo students - I have so much fun, and we all learn a lot! The monthly performance lessons also transformed me from someone who resisted to play for anyone to someone who is not afraid to play in front of people... Suzuki's motto is "Nurtured by Love" - adults can use some too. :)
One unfortunate consequence of the "Nurtured By Love" framing, in my experience, is that if you do fail at Suzuki, all sorts of emotional baggage and fallout can occur. If you believe this experience was being "nurtured by love," you start to question the nature of love, or at least of your own understanding of what love means. You start to feel that your failure was a consequence of not loving enough, or of some dire character defect on your part. If you believe the Suzuki philosophy isn't just about making you a better violin player, but also about making you a *better person* (emphasis mine), and you fail, then you've failed not just as a violinist but as a good person. And your child failed at that too.
I think that the Suzuki Method, even more than it's a well-thought out pedagogy, has it's value in the philosophy. The idea that the music serves the child's needs as they develop into a noble human being. That the child need not depend on talent to experience the joy of music. That even the most untalented child still deserves the opportunity to develop their musical ability and the beautiful heart that comes with it. That the child is nurtured through the music and their music study - no rulers across the knuckles, no hitting the child over the head with a bow. When a child finishes the Suzuki repertoire, their need to be nurtured is not finished. So as other posters have said, at that point whether a Suzuki environment will continue to serve the student does depend on the strength of the teacher and whether they have the skills to teach beyond the books. In the traditional world as well, there are plenty of teachers who can't or shouldn't teach beyond an intermediate level so this is not unique to Suzuki. There's just a label to pin on it.
A case in point: I'm kind of a middle-of-the roader on the whole Suzuki thing. My pedagogy prof was a Mimi Zweig protoge, with a lot of Suzuki-type qualities-the little kid affinity, the metaphors, etc. I am originally a by-ear player but my mentality is much more concrete and I just don't naturally teach well at the super-little-kid level, so I tend to start my students older and teach more concretely but still do the step-by-step thing and introduce ear training right off the bat, etc. Early in my teaching I came up with what I thought was an original way of teaching notereading, only to find out that both my Suzuki training teacher and my Suzuki-hating colleague did it exactly the same way. The only difference: she introduced it separately from actual playing till around bk 2 (age 5 or 6 with her kids); he introduced it very first thing with his 5 and 6 yr old beginners :) She showed me bow "tricks" and games to use with my little kids. He showed me some of the exact same ideas that he used with his little kids. They both loved shoulder rests. (Ok, ok, maybe that's beside the point... :)
But, someone says, you can't make it required or tthey'll learn to hate it! Well....I was required to learn to read and I still love it-I am thankful for the opportunity! In my experience, those who did not like something they had to learn either 1) had a bad teacher, 2) just didn't have an affinity for the subject (but we require things all the time that not everybody likes simply because they're important to functioning in society!) Or 3) didn't like it then but retained and came back to it/enjoyed it later (kind of like me and science classes...)
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