Most of you probably know that I am about 37 weeks pregnant now, waiting for our baby girl to make her grand entrance into the world.  At this point, I have finished all my teaching for the year and am now on what feels like a well-deserved maternity leave from my job at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music.  I'll be taking the summer off, but am pretty sure that I'll be itching to get back to work in the fall. 

And why is that?  Because this short few weeks off has made me realize that teaching makes me feel alive.  Even though it can at times be exhausting and frustrating, there is the constant challenge of making the guitar an exhilarating means of self-expression and more than just a wooden box from the music store down the street.  When I sit back and think that some of my intermediate and advanced students had absolutely no knowledge of this instrument when they walked into my studio, I feel a deep sense of pride in helping them find this gift that I was also given at such a young age. 

But my favorite thing about teaching guitar goes beyond the music and the technicalities of the instrument.  I think in the end, I could be teaching anything and my favorite part about it would still be the same.  I really love getting to be involved in a student's life, investing in him, seeing him consistently week in and week out, and having a relationship that is different from the category of parent, friend, colleague, or classroom teacher.  I'm trying to coach him to get to a place in which musical expression, this new language to replace verbal language, is easily accessed, even second nature.  I'm helping him into this new world in which playing guitar becomes something more important each week, something deeply personal and integral to his identity.  It's hard to get this level of depth with a student every week, but on those rare days that it does come out, I'm reminded that this student is a person, and I am a person, and life is really about the connection that one person makes with another person who makes a connection with another person, and this is how communities form.  That's so simple yet so refreshing to me as I sit here idly at home, waiting for my baby to arrive and be yet another participant in this thing we call community that makes our lives fuller and more beautiful to be lived.

As a closet extrovert, I go a little crazy without social interaction of some sort on a daily basis.  Although I absolutely love my moments of alone time, at times the hardest thing about being a guitarist is that it is a pretty solitary instrument.  Luckily, the hours that I might spend practicing alone is offset by time spent teaching.  So to all my students who may or may not be reading this that have made this year a fulfilling and productive one, I wish you a wonderful summer and look forward to seeing you again in the fall... probably more than you think.