Klarinet Archive - Posting 001016.txt from 1999/10
From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay) Subj: Re: [kl] re: playing the Clarinet from behind the student Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 14:20:44 -0500
On Sun, 31 Oct 1999 10:48:48 -0600, jhobby@-----.net said:
> All things being considered, I suggest that if a teacher needs to help
> a student with clarinet positioning, it would be better to do it with
> as little touching as possible, regardless of how innocent that touch
> is. It's better to be safe than sorry. Very sorry!
One of the most interesting things for me about this exchange has been
the way in which I have started to see my own actions in a sinister
light as more people posted. I really didn't like that feeling!
I work both in England and abroad, but quite a large proportion of my
teaching is done in Italy, in a culture where the physical expression of
affection occurs as a natural part of everyday life.
It's quite normal for the Director of the Accademia where I teach a
postgraduate course to embrace me enthusiastically when I turn up to
teach, and his wife, son and daughter do likewise, when they happen to
be around. Some of the students too, both male and female, find it
natural to give me a hug, if we know each other well and are beginning
to regard ourselves as colleagues -- this last being an attitude I try
to encourage.
Apart from this sort of thing, which I suppose is part of the culture,
like waving your hands around, I would normally have no particular
necessity to touch a student -- the occasions on which I might do so are
really few and far between. Indeed, I'd never even really thought about
it being inadvisable.
Yet, as David wrote "demonstrate on your own stomach, if you're inclined
to do so," I noticed myself beginning to feel guilty, as though it *is*
actually *wrong* to touch someone in that way even when given permission
beforehand.
This 'beginning to feel guilty' might obviously be a mechanism by which
our attitudes began to change for the worse -- and not just our
attitudes to our own actions, but to other people's. You'd even start
to think twice about giving someone a hug.
It does seem to me, from what Jim writes above, and despite his
warnings, that even in the US you'd have either to behave quite stupidly
or to be *very* unlucky to be taken to court over a truly innocent
action of the sort I described -- which makes me think that we may have
some duty not to bend to the sort of pressure that the 'cycle of fear'
he talks about may generate. So though I was perhaps rather unfair to
Ed Lacy (after all, he was only trying to be helpful) when I said:
> in my view, an educator who *doesn't* behave in a normal human fashion
> with his/her students is the educator who has 'rocks in the head'.
...it could be that an educator that appears reckless to some of you may
actually be doing something that is morally good.
But perhaps it's easy for me to say that in the circumstances I find
myself.
Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339
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