Meet The Teacher.

The Maestro and I don’t eat Wheat.

The Maestro has a number of sensory regulation issues, such as being auditory defensive. Essentially, this means that he doesn’t like noise, and that he doesn’t tune things out like most people do. There are several other things that are related, like not liking to wear blue jeans (scratchy pants) or any clothes at all, if he can help it.

Removing Gluten (from wheat, oats, rye, barley) and Casein (a dairy protein) from his diet has seemed to help a lot.* So I have taken up gluten-free baking. My first blog is actually about that, which you can find with Google and “baking with Jowar”. Myself, I just find that I feel much better and require less sleep when I don’t eat gluten.

One night in June, we were working on a home renovation project when the phone rang. A lady from New Germany named Hildegard, who has celiac disease, was starting a Sabbatical at the University. Hildegard is a member of our church, and wanted to talk about the availability of Gluten-free bread for communion. We had already worked a system out for the Maestro and me, so she could just sit with us on Sundays.

It turns out that her sabbatical is to start a Ph.D. in orchestra conducting, and she is a cello player and strings teacher. This is definitely someone whom the Maestro could get along with. Not only does she have her very own cello, but she has the same answer he does to his favorite question for new people, “Do you eat wheat?”

Shortly after getting set up here, Hildegard went home for a few weeks and we decided that the Maestro needed cello lessons. We were concerned about how he would handle lessons, (see previous posts) and Hildegard already knew him, and would be going in with eyes open. I emailed her this:

“So, I have a couple of questions for you. First, are you planning to or interested in having a cello student this year? I understand that you are here to do a number of things, and that teaching cello may not be one of them. In the event of not being available to teach [The Maestro], you had said that a good teacher would be able to teach him how he needed to learn. Do you have any suggestions for recognizing such a teacher?”

She emailed back that she had the day before realized that she needed to have a student regardless of not having time for one, and that she had been telling her family about this boy she had met who loved music so… If we were serious, we should read at least two of some books she recommends.** Sometimes, things come together in such a way that going along somehow seems inescapable. Like that, Hildegard became The Teacher.

The Maestro loves playing “The Teacher”. The Maestro has built an apartment for the Teacher in his room that he goes to for his lessons everyday. Carolyn stays in our room between practice sessions, and he starts each “lesson” with a trip to New Germany to get his cello. Riley has set a rule that she gets to be the Teacher at least every other time, because the Maestro had been wanting to give her the lesson every time. Yesterday they had only two lessons, but they were each double lessons, with each of them taking a turn to be Hildegard.

One funny thing about him pretending to be the Teacher is that it helps him get dressed. I mentioned that he doesn’t like to wear clothes around the house. But, you don’t have a cello lesson in your underwear, and you certainly don’t give a lesson that way. The other night, after playing in the wading pool in the back yard, he told me he wanted to play “The Teacher”. I said that was OK, and he got upset because he couldn’t, because he needed clothes!

A new lesson tomorrow. Riley has a few questions.

*(See A.M. Knivsberg, Nutritional Neuroscience, 2002 Vol. 5 (4), pp. 251–261, Nutritional Neuroscience, 2003 Vol. 6 (1), pp. 19–28, and references therein for explanation.)

**"Nurtured by Love" by S. Suzuki
"Ability Development from Age Zero" by S. Suzuki
"They're Rarely too Young and Never too Old to Twinkle" by K. Slone
"Helping Parents Practice" by E. Sprunger