Bag of Tricks: Teaching Beginning String Players Scales Part 1
One of my professors (Dr. Ted Ashton) used to refer to ways to teach concepts as your "bag of tricks." As you would teach more, you would continue to develop this "bag of tricks" so that in many different situations you would be able to teach lots of concepts in many different ways. In addition to coming up with your own bag of tricks, it can be really useful to find out the ways other teachers teach the same concepts. This especially useful since students will all think in a variety of ways, and it may be that the way one teacher teaches a concept is easier for one student to understand than the way you teach it. I'd like to start sharing some of my "bag of tricks," as I've begun to find some very effective ways of teaching certain concepts. Today I wanted to focus on some approaches I've had to teaching scales to beginning students. Some of this may take longer than a lesson to discuss with a student, and I find that sometimes we have