The minute hand now swings easily around the clock on my Monday afternoons at Paraclete, and each class whizzes by at a speed I never could have anticipated a month or two ago. And somehow now that the boys are playing the violin the entire time, now that they are handling these violins that still feel foreign and special, now that they can just begin to feel their own progress and catch a few of their own mistakes, I seem to have much more clout in their eyes. I have the answers to all the questions, I know how to do everything, and they all want my approval. I could get used to this.

Each week I now look forward to working with the kids, to watching them learn and laugh and begin to figure things out on their own. They are beginning to help each other. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They get excited by playing “Skip to My Lou” even though they only know five of the notes so far. And discipline suddenly became easy. When David starts a noisy tremolo because I’m working on Terrence’s bow hand, I make a “ssshht” sound at him and he stops. When Andrew sits down every five minutes and says he can play just fine that way, I tell him then he can play that way by himself, at home, without the violin, and he stands back up. When David and Patrick leave the room to work on a few things that David is having trouble with and Andrew looks at me and says, “You know, I really want to say something really mean about David right now. I really want to say – ” I tell him, “Andrew, you are not going to say anything at all about David right now, or ever in this room. In this room we respect everyone in the class. Do you know what respect is? You can think whatever you want, but thinking bad things about people is not going to get you where you want to go in life, and you will be able to do all sorts of things with your life. Got it?” Subdued, he nods and looks at me, then at his violin, and I realize that he really is not going to make fun of David any more. Ms. S just became Queen Bee.

And so it goes. Patrick still comes to help out, which is tremendous, and I continue to learn from him and from all the boys, in different ways. Afterwards we work together on his latest music assignment from school and I love to watch him think, to teach him how to practice by what we do, to feel him get better. When he looks at me I realize that he trusts me. It is such a strange feeling, to be trusted by someone so quickly. And yet, lovely, too. Afterwards he wants to tell me all about his weekend plans, the ice hockey rink he built with friends in an empty lot, the teacher at school that assigns too much busywork. Not only is it rewarding to watch him grow and open up to me, but it is a wonderful surprise to see how my initial project has morphed – and, as these past couple of months have show, even continues to change – as I have transitioned from teaching middle-school boys about music appreciation and violin to group violin lessons to group violin for the middle school-ers and a private lesson for the high schooler. And it is so fun to have added another dimension to what I am doing at Paraclete, and to see how the two components enhance and help each other and further refine my own abilities as a teacher.

I don’t need to see Terrence’s furrowed brow to know how hard he is working, but it is a sweet addition to his straight bow and sometimes-good sound, his tendency to forget to begin each bow “near the frog,” and the way his knees spring on every beat, keeping his rhythm with his body. I certainly remember my own days of bouncing to the beat! Across the room, Andrew is quiet, and not a single sarcastic comment or attention-getting joke has escaped from his lips all semester. Before we begin each line, he looks up at me to insure that I have checked out his bow hand (flawless), his left hand, his curved pinky and good posture. Although I am often correcting James’ bow hand (“no claw, remember?”), he is quick to point it out in others, and I encourage them to help each other, to go through their own checklists mentally before they begin each time. I see them all muttering under their breath as they set up: “pinky curved, violin more to my shoulder, no pizza wrists.” While last semester I was struggling to keep them quiet and to focus their attention on the lesson, the time is much easier now, and the vast improvement in their violin-playing stamina is a trusty witness.

I began the semester with a bit of review, some games, some questions, and collecting ideas of what they wanted to do this semester (all of which involved learning to Play, already!), but right away brought all the violins to the first class. I had made binders for each student, and I quickly learned this was also a good way to keep them on task (a lesson from the previous semester: more work for me outside the classroom means less work inside the classroom!). The first class with all of them playing was a bit rough (and followed a class in which only James showed up – again getting a head start and a private lesson with me, which was a pleasure for both of us!), and I felt I would go through the roof if I heard another scratchy A or D String. But it improves each week, and the boys improve each week – making the teaching both more delightful for me and more tolerable for my ears! I worried tremendously that they would not all progress at the same speed, and wondered how I would manage to continue to keep them all playing together even if some things were easy for Andrew and nearly impossible for Terrence. Never fear, Patrick appears.

In December, Sister Ann pulled me aside during the music breakfast so that she could tell me about Patrick. A Junior in high school, Patrick graduated from Paraclete and is now enrolled at Boston Latin, where he plays viola in his school orchestra. He wanted to meet me and she thought I should get to know him as well. I found him and invited him to the table where I was seated with my quartet, and we all talked a bit – good kid, kind of shy. In early January I got his phone number from the Center and called to ask if he would be willing to volunteer to help with my class, in exchange for a private viola lesson afterwards. He was onboard immediately (bless these new schools that require community service hours!). And he has made an absolutely UNBELIEVABLE difference in my days. The boys respond to him — an older boy who shares their background, who speaks their language, who can talk about video games and schools and hockey in the same Southie accent.

And he can certainly talk about the violin. It was clear to me from the start that he was taught well (he began in school, and now plays in orchestra there while also taking private lessons, theory, string technique, and orchestra at the Community Music School of Boston on Saturdays), and he could easily explain things to the boys that sometimes I struggled with. All those catch-phrases and gimmicks you hear when first learning the violin have been buried in my consciousness for years, but are still swirling in the upper levels of Patrick’s consciousness, and run through his head on a regular basis. He seems to be a natural teacher, and after some initial hesitation at the first class, when I felt his eyes questioning me about what to do, and when, and with whom, he quickly was able to jump in and work on his own. Now we make a good team, and it is easy to split the boys up when James needs extra help with his note-reading and Terrence needs some note-value review. This week David burst into class after a close-to-heavenly forty-five minutes, announcing loudly, “And now, David is here and the music class can begin. This is what you’ve all been waiting for.” First I experienced extreme irritation – he had already missed the first month of classes, and I never felt like he really cared about it that much anyway . . . and now here he was, disrupting my moment of achievement. And then I quickly tried to catch him up in a few minutes to the other boys, but when I realized it was not working and the others were getting restless, it was easy for me to take David to another room and leave the rest – who had previously been working and behaving like saints – with Patrick. Now I am experiencing what others have told me all along – sometimes you just need someone else to help you out. Amen.