I have loved fiddle music all my life. I want to get more immersed in it than just attending a few local jam sessions. In recent years, I've gotten better at the "by-ear" side of music. Having been brought up largely classical, and being a strong technical player that can sight-read very well, I learned that those who are good at sight-reading tend to be bad at "by-ear". Upon hearing that, I made it my mission to be good at both. Since that decision, I have gotten immensely better at figuring out tunes "by-ear" but I'm not as quick as I'd like to be. I know that language immersion is the fastest and best way to learn, so I think that maybe fiddle immersion is a good way for me to try.
I want to see what it's like to live a very simple life without all the modern distractions we live with today. I want to see what it's like to live very in tuned with nature, and do everything by hand. I want to experience something totally different than my regular life, and return to the childhood "summer camp" type of experience of living in cabins.
I've developed a curriculum to teach violin-playing skills to young children. I want to make learning to play the violin fun and easy for children because it's a difficult instrument to learn, but a very beautiful instrument, and learning to play well is a very rewarding experience. So many kids get discouraged early on because the technique is difficult. I've taken my teaching experience, and experience working with young children, and developed games and various fun ways to teach the technique so students can feel confident playing when they are ready.
Children are naturally inclined towards music. It's intrinsically in every human being, and I want to foster that ability to bring it to out early on.
I've been ballroom dancing for over 8 years. I started in college and as captain of my ballroom team, I devoted all my time and energy into growing the team and teaching the newer dancers, so I never got a chance to further my competition goals. After college I was able to focus on my own dance development but I moved around so much that it was hard to maintain a steady dance partnership. Now, I have a dance partner that I've been dancing with for over a year, and we have progressed together rapidly. I feel that it is possible to achieve great results with this dance partner, but the limit is that our partnership has an expiration date - he is finishing up grad school and will be moving on to another job in a far away location at the end of this year. We have to work harder in a shorter amount of time to accomplish what others have done in far greater years of dancing, and years dancing with the same steady partner.
