Learning and growing with Settlement

For a parent's insights into the Settlement community and the bonds between student and teacher, we turn the blog over to Andy Trackman, whose daughter studies with Kathleen Scheide at the Germantown branch.

Every Wednesday, I pick up my daughter from school at Germantown Friends School and drive the short trip to Settlement’s Germantown branch. We make our way up the second floor to the music studio. We’ve been doing this for about 6 years now. This is her first year at GFS; the past 5 years of lessons, we have come from Greene Street Friends, only a block shorter.

Between lessons here is a lot like between classes at a school, in terms of activity. You see a mix of students and parents coming in: reluctant toddlers being pushed along by their parents, teenagers arriving on their own with their instruments, excited youngsters hurrying, their parents close behind. Many join me in the hallway, with book or smartphone in hand, waiting for the lesson to finish, while others go into the lesson with their kids. What I like is seeing all these different people coming in and out, it’s more of a community than an individual lesson in your house. You feel like you’re part of something bigger and more interesting.

The view from the hall at the Germantown branch

 Many weeks, it’s just me and all the lessons going on – piano in one room, strings in another, drums down the hall. Just as I can hear lessons through the doors of the practice rooms, I can listen to the teachers play their own music in the gaps between their lessons or if their next student is running late. Just from these short practice sessions, I realize how accomplished they are, and how fortunate I am to have my daughter being taught by one of them.

Now that she’s 15, my daughter more actively appreciates the accomplishments of her teacher. This past summer, we attended a concert by in which her teacher performed. It featured Baroque music on period-accurate instruments. Her performance was wonderful, and afterwards my daughter and I talked about how good she was. Now, did this inspire her to practice more? Did she suddenly feel the need to learn harder pieces, become more focused?

Not exactly. But I do think she is more respectful of her lesson time, now that she knows the relationship with her teacher is more than just the thirty minutes she spends with her each week. She’s also starting to write her own songs and lyrics. She takes what she’s learning in her lessons and applies it to the music she likes to create. She wouldn’t have the vocabulary or the knowledge to do this otherwise. Her mother and I felt she needed music education in her life, not so she would become a concert pianist, but so she could get to know an instrument she could use and enjoy and benefit from for life.