JAVS Summer 2021

faculty member of the Music Institute of Chicago and SAA teacher trainer, used the online platform Flipgrid to create fun weekly assignments for her younger students to complete outside of their lesson time. Like her colleagues at universities, Montzka was worried about the mental health of her students. To keep them connected with their peers, she created a 2020 Summer Viola Adventures classes for 9–12 and 13–15 year olds that included weekly listening and lectures and fun projects that they could complete in between classes using Flipgrid. The highlight of her program included “celebrity sightings” with famous violists such as Matthew Lipman, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, Nadia Sirota, Jonathan Vinocour, and The Running Viola Alistair Rutherford, who joined the class for their Viola Trivia event. Milwaukee-area violist and Suzuki teacher Julie Bamberger Roubik also grappled with concerns over staying connected with her students. In early summer 2020, she took a day off of teaching to drive around the greater metro area to check in with her students in person in their front yards. She repeated this road trip in December and hopes that through this gesture, her students “know that there is an adult who is not their family member who really loves them.” As a benefit of spending the year on Zoom, Roubik plans to keep “zooming” student recitals for family members out of state, and hopes that she can keep teaching students who have moved away from her area online instead of placing them with new teachers. Kristina Turner, viola instructor at the Gifted Music School in Salt Lake City and viola vice president of the Utah Suzuki Association, organized a day of online events to celebrate National Viola Day on January 30. She reported that with the all-online format, students from around the state were able to participate and enrollment was much higher than for similar in-person events she hosted in the past. She appreciated the fact that there was no cost or time associated with travel for the families, and that because she didn’t have to rent a space to hold the event, her budget had minimal expenses. She hopes to expand on the event next year, embracing the technology that allows students from around the country to connect virtually with master teachers.

Although teaching during a pandemic has proved challenging, 2020/21 will be remembered by many as a year in which violists were able to connect in record numbers. From informal zoom get togethers with old friends to master-class swaps and zoom recitals, teachers were able to offer new challenges to their students to keep them practicing and engaged. Indeed, as teachers, we may look back on this time and realize that many pandemic programs created for this unique time are more cost effective and allow for greater accessibility. In reflecting on the unusual year of teaching that we’ve all experienced, Sarah Montzka offers this: “My big takeaway is that I’m just so grateful for our broader viola community and how generous, kind, and open our viola people are. It’s pretty inspiring to feel part of this special club where everyone is a team player. It doesn’t matter where you are on your viola journey, we’re all on that journey together.”

Katherine Lewis is Professor of Viola at Illinois State University where she also serves as acting-director and master teacher for the ISU String Project.

Notes

1 First shared by cellist Amy Barston in a Facebook teacher’s group

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 37, 2021 Online Issue

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