Teaching

Last night I taught my first taiko class all by myself. I've done lots of assisting before, I've done team-teaching before, but I never had my own solo class. I wasn't too nervous because I've been anticipating this since February of last year. I created my own syllabus and went over what I wanted to teach and got some feedback and was pretty confident. There was about an hour right before class when I started to get nervous, but then I told myself: shut up. Once I was up there, with students in the class looking at me, and me looking at them, well the nervousness kind of melted away and we got down to business. Actually my class was completely sold out, and if I hadn't brought my shime, we wouldn't have had enough drums! Can you believe that? My class is the first RCW class to sell out!

After class I was thinking about how full circle I've come. It feels like not too long ago that I was a beginning student learning renshu (I still think of myself as a beginner, actually). And now, thanks to Janet who keeps offering up these great opportunities and experiences to me, I'm doing the teaching. I've got my own class and my own students and everything. That's kind of a big step for me! I keep making these steps--some big, some really small, each bringing me a little further along. It's exciting.