I wanted to give you all a follow up to the Learning freedom! post I had made a few months ago.  That post was about our realizing that just because my husband has been playing guitar forever doesn’t meant he knew how to break down lessons for our fourteen year old.  While our son is very self motivated, he also really enjoys one on one interaction when learning certain things.  To read more about our decision to find him a guitar teacher and sign him up for lessons you can read my Learning freedom! post.

Our judgment and decision in getting the help we needed was right on!  While I did have to remind him to practice at first, he seemed to be having no trouble at all picking it up.  We had been secretly hoping that he'd get more excited and the reminders to practice would turn into just hearing him play.

And then it happened!!  It started by him telling me that he had been learning a favorite song from one of his video games.  Out of curiosity, I asked him if it was an assignment from his teacher or was it something he wanted to do on is own.  It was so much of what he wanted to do on his own that he forgot all about what his teacher had asked him to practice!  He came in the night before his lesson asking my husband for help with the song he was supposed to be working on.

We really knew that spark was lit when he came in with a fire in his eyes asking for his own acoustic guitar the next day!  Since then he has gone to a month's more of lessons and we have decided that he is over that hump enough for my husband to take over instruction.  In fact, he has been coming to ask him about things so often that he already spends more time having instruction from dad than he does with his teacher!  That said we have decided that now is the time to pull him from lessons and let my husband totally take over.  

Our son now has his own amp and effects.  He has customized his guitar.  He even grabbed my husband's 12-string and has been playing that.  There isn't a day that goes by that I don't hear him practicing or learning something new. 

We are so grateful to his teacher for filling in the gap that we needed filled for the time that we needed it.  I am so glad that we tuned out certain vocal unschooling voices in the community that preach that we should just let him do it on his own.  We knew better than to let this type of learning happen through osmosis!  It just doesn't fit his learning style to do so.  We saw that he had a natural ability and wanted to do everything we could to foster it.  By recognizing that we could easily get him the help and resources he needed, we saved him from a lot of frustration. 

The lesson in this is to recognize when you need help and know when to ask for the specific help you need.  You don't have to sign up for a full program, curriculum or anything you don't see as a benefit but you never know what kind of help there is if you don't look for it.

I must also give huge props to our son's teacher, Byron Marks!  If you are in the southern NH area, he teaches at  Manchester Music Mill.  Tell him I sent you!  Also if you are looking for a new or used instrument, the Music Mill also has it's own store.

I am grateful to have the freedom to homeschool our children and help them learn different things on an ongoing basis.  Our most recent experience with this has been in the area of music.  As my longtime readers know, we are a pretty musical family.  (If you are a new subscriber, here are a couple of my husband's band's music videos that I have shared before -  Adrenaline Addiction

Under Pressure - Cover

Each of our kids have had varying degrees of musical interest.   They have the opportunity to play with various instruments we have around the house – a piano, my old flute, smaller sized electric and acoustic guitars and a full size drum kit.  Our youngest likes to sing and needs her own microphone if she’s hanging with us when we practice.  Our oldest had expressed interest in taking piano lessons when he was about seven.  He has also performed on stage in musical productions.  Recently, he has been expressing interest in learning how to play the guitar.

Now you would think this would be a no-brainer.  We bought him his own electric guitar and mounted a hangar for it on the wall in his room.  We set him up with some video lessons and a couple of basic books to refer to.  On top of that we figured since my husband has been playing guitar for so long and I have some classical guitar lessons behind me, we’d have it covered.  That all makes sense, right?  We were so wrong!

We were assuming he’d just jump right in, be motivated to do it and ask us for help if he needed it.  Weeks went by and the guitar hadn’t been touched more than a few times.  When I asked him if he liked the video lessons he said he did but I still didn’t see right away why he just wasn’t running with it if he really wanted to play. 

After some consideration, I realized we apparently forgot that with some things he really enjoys learning through direct interaction.  It turns out that this would be one of those things!  The videos just weren’t interactive enough and couldn’t replace an in-person human teacher for him.  I also realized that just because we are musicians doesn’t automatically mean we know how to break it down simply enough for a beginner to learn without getting frustrated; not to say we didn’t try!  We had a bit of our own egos to swallow to admit this but once we did, it was easy to figure out the next step. 

My husband and I enjoy going out to see live bands and have started to get to know who’s who locally.  We discovered that one of the guitarists we have seen live that we liked just happened to also offer lessons.  We signed him up and he is doing really well.  While we understood that it is most important that the teacher not only enjoys playing the type of music he wants to play and can play it well, it is just important that he must be someone that our son enjoys learning from.   Thankfully we chose right!