Archived under: Teaching
Ten Years of Horn Teaching
I still have a small archive left of articles from my original HTML Horn Notes Blog, which predates the content featured now in Horn Matters. This short article was first posted on 8/21/2006 and came back to mind working on my previous article as I am at present very near the end of my tenth full year of teaching at Arizona State University.
Today marked the first day of my tenth year of teaching the horn full time. Time flies!
My first full time position was as Third Horn in The Nashville Symphony; I performed with them for five seasons. Between my third and fourth season I was granted a leave and taught full time at Tunghai University in Taiwan for a year. After two more years of playing in Nashville I won my second full time teaching job, at the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam. I was there for three years, and now I am beginning my sixth year of teaching at ASU.
I am sure I am now a more effective teacher than I was when I started out. I do look forward to the next ten years.
Today I would echo a similar thought, thinking often of the students I have been able to work with in the past and looking forward to continued work with students in the present and in the future. I am very blessed to be able to work in a field with so much one-on-one contact with talented and focused students.
In addition, this short article from the archive is a reminder of how fast the Internet has moved. We have advanced from a time before blogging software to a time of personal blogs to the present where we at Horn Matters at least are aiming for more of an online magazine format. There is a trend line for sure away from print publications and traditional magazine and newsletter formats, as their content is largely “lost” compared to the easy access to online resources such as Horn Matters.
Finally, going back to the topic of this article, I firmly believe there will always be a strong place for the one-on-one contact of teacher and student, and it is a contact that I don’t think can really effectively be done online. It is a topic of our time that I should expand upon in some future article, but if it is a topic you are considering David Wilken recently posted some thoughts on the topic worth checking out.
972 articles: JOHN ERICSON has wide-ranging experience as an orchestral player, soloist, and teacher.» About John Ericson » More articles » Horn Notes Edition » Contact
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