Becoming a Teacher

Ever since I started playing the piano, I would love to go off by myself and play my heart out. I progressed by listening and learning songs by other people, mostly from movies like The Truman Show, or Tarzan, or Mulan, and a couple of songs from my friends who read music. I would listen though, because I didn't know how to read music, and I would embellish on what I heard. I loved Enya, and the LOTR, and any kind of music with a beautiful piano part in it was what I tried to learn. My point in writing all of this is to emphasize that my love for the piano and beautiful music is what helped me be as good as I am today. Lol, and I don't say that arrogantly; any kind of arrogance has always bothered me. Some say it's a fault of mine, because I try very hard not to put myself forward. Anyways, I hold my own in piano playing, and the ability to hear music in my head, and I try to get it out as best as I can, which led to me writing my own music. I started out with just piano solos, but as I branched out, I wrote lyrics, and melodies, and it's incredible how wonderful it feels to accomplish something, even as simple as a song.
So anyways, when my dad announced that I would be teaching Jenelle, Stephen, and Kevan how to play, I was thinking to myself, uh... just exactly how am I going to do this? (See? There it is, my flaw: reluctant to step in the limelight, to act like I can do anything, or to assume that I'm good enough to do what dad expected.) But I did the best I could. I remember telling them, "Ok Jenelle, you do this on this part, and hey Stephen, play these chords, and Kevan, try to hear the beat in how I'm playing it..." It was pretty neat to see, after a few weeks of playing together, the progress they were making. We were actually starting to sound like a band! So that's pretty much how it went. For the next couple of years, we played my songs, and I wrote more songs, and Stephen started coming up with guitar solos, and Kevan came up with cooler beats and occasionally a few awesome drum solos :) and the same with Jenelle and her bass, just getting out of that "one note" box, and really starting to play her bass the way she should. It's been awesome, and I'm really lucky that my dad believed that I could do something out of my comfort zone, when I didn't, because if he hadn't then I wouldn't be playing along with my sister and brothers.