I really can teach....

I've been holding small handbell rehearsals, maximum six ringers plus me. This week I knew there would only be four of us, but folk didn't want me to cancel. They keep talking about doing handbell quartets, but I know what they were talking about was really 8-bell music, where each person has two or three bells. True quartet ringing is far more complicated-- each person's part is written like a voice singing, so that you change bells repeatedly, and often pick up a bell that someone else has rung before you. I got some 8-bell music ready, but also bought the easiest real quartet I could find, and studied how to teach it.

I began by working on the physical skill with no music in sight. Ring a bell with your right hand, while simultaneously putting down your left hand bell. Pick up a different bell with the left. Now ring the left while putting down the right (damping its sound on the padded table), change bells and continue.

Then we opened up the quartet music and took it in tiny bites-- one measure, at a snail's pace, at first. We were laughing at all the "bloopers" and I kept promising that if it got too frustrating we'd read some simpler 8-bell music; but to my astonishment, we all began to get the hang of things, and hacked our way through the entire two page piece, 4 measures at a time. And then the magic happened. "That was fun! Can we do it again?" At the end of 40 minutes, we had played through the entire thing without stopping twice, and felt incredibly victorious.

Helping people tackle something challenging with joy and confidence-- that's what it's all about, for me.