Wanna feel like an instant Rock Star? Play live music for a class full of elementary school kids. I brought my violin to my daughter’s school today, as I have every St. Patrick’s Day since she was in kindergarten, to play Irish music for some of the classes. There’s no more appreciative audience than a room full of squirrelly kids who get 15 minutes of something totally unexpected.
Of course it helps if you’re playing some of the world’s most recognized party music on a holiday marked by eating unnaturally colored foods and searching for invisible mischief-making men.
The kindergarteners are always my favorite, because when the teacher asks how many in the class know how to dance an Irish jig, over half of them raise their hands, and when she gives them the go-ahead to dance around the classroom while I’m playing, they throw their little bodies into improvised jigs with great abandon. When it’s question time I get queries like, “Do you play that music from Irish?” which is kind of existential, when you think about it.
The kids usually want to know how long I’ve been playing, and is it hard. I tell them that I started in the third grade and played through 12th grade, but then didn’t play for 18 years and then picked it up again as an adult. I tell them to learn an instrument, any instrument, when they are young and they will always have it with them.
I tell them not to get discouraged if they don’t like the first instrument they try, and that I played piano for a year when I was in the first grade and then my parents finally let me quit taking lessons because I hated it and would never practice, but then I tried violin in third grade and stuck with it and like it so much better.
I tell them that it is hard to learn at first, but you get better at it the more you do it, and that most things worth doing are kind of hard to begin with but then they get really fun.
When it’s almost time for me to go the teacher asks if they would like one more song and they scream “Yeesss!” so loud I feel like Joan Jett. I play “Irish Washerwoman” and they get a few more minutes to get their ya-ya’s out before I head out to the next classroom.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
