Jose

Having been a teacher since 2013, I've come to learn a lot about not only myself and the way I teach but also what "teaching" means to me. When I started, I was mostly tutoring in person, then I started teaching online, so I had a mix of both around 2017. I taught ELA, social studies, some science, math, and music (piano, guitar, drums, saxophone). However, my expertise lies in the skills, however, that I myself have come to consider 'decent mastery' on the FLUTE (e.g. tone, colour, breathing, tuning) beyond what I learned in high school through band. This includes the clarinet but also the oboe (which I've also learned to create good sound on particularly because I learned how to scrape the reed, balancing tone and colour in the lower and upper registers). In addition to this, starting in 2017, I learned and have been learning to get better at the classical guitar, improving how I sound not only through technique but also maintaining healthy nails for the right hand. I've also been in several choirs in the past where I both sang and played a wind instrument. This added to my skillset, especially when it comes to posture, breathing, and phrasing.

My teaching style comes in 2 ways:

Formal (more technical) - textbooks or guide books, applied theory and studies, and rudimentary techniques alongside practical application of lesson content through pieces and/or songs.

Less formal or non-structured (more organic) - ear-training-related work (i.e. playing a piece or song right away / learning as you go through the ears), feeling rhythm through the body and ears, then later followed by (/reverse-engineered through) the reading of notations and all rudimentary symbologies and methodologies like in the above 'formal' way. The key here is to embody music; sound came before notation just like language and communication came before writing.