Teaching Philosophy

Learning is my hobby. I know of no one who can exhaust, or is incompetent at, their hobby. I want learning to be your hobby. I believe that no other discipline allows a student to exercise all their learning skills as does music. You can work in hard-edged technical, abstract theoretical and even fuzzy creative domains. We have it all. Music helps us see how everything is really connected.

The best kind of learning is self-directed and self-powered. I look for, and strive to promote, student independence. My expectations in courses might seem vague at times because I try to place my expectations behind those of a fully charged student. I hope to encourage students to shoulder the majority of the responsibility for directing their own learning. Common to most of my classes is a hope that students will push against their own thresholds of ambiguity and be able, independently, to generate the next relevant question in their self-designed learning process.

Learning is the goal and music is the catalyst. Together, we can discover exciting things about ourselves through the lens of musical activity.