I had a strange experience recently. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that a new student, whom I had already had a consultation with the week before, came for one lesson and decided that I made her feel really uncomfortable. It’s a strange experience for me because in twenty-six years of teaching, I’ve never had anyone say that. It ate away at me for days as I tried to go over the lesson we had in my head and figure out what I had done wrong.

There is a real joy for me in teaching guitar, but I admit it took me awhile to be any good at it. That’s probably true for most teachers, and I suppose some never really get any good at it! I mean, all of us remember the good teachers we had in school, and the not so good ones. Teaching goes beyond “knowing” something, and that’s the real secret.

My first experience with teaching was nothing to do with music at all. I was a computer operator (that’s what they called us in the 80s!) at the Vancouver Public Library, and over the period that we became automated, I had to teach a lot of the staff how to use a computer. Many of these people were librarians who were older and who had barely even heard the word computer, let alone used one! I had a knack for teaching, and out of our little group of computer operators, my boss gave me most of the teaching duties. I really enjoyed it. I created a bit of a patter, complete with jokes and quips, and I slowly and carefully, and joyously, brought those librarians into the digital age. It was very satisfying.

Teaching guitar was simply an idea that came to me in a daydream. I realized that I could take what I had learned through teaching at the library and teach guitar instead.  And that if it went well enough, I could quit my part-time job in radio and teach at home so I didn’t have to keep my girls in daycare. I first taught through the city in one of those community centre programmes. I wrote up a proposal for teaching an adult guitar class and they accepted it. A lot of students signed up, which was great, but then I realized the disadvantage. There were really too many of them, and I had never taught guitar before, so I didn’t know how to make sure they were all getting something out of it. I’m sure some of them had fun, but knowing what I know now, I’m convinced that some did not benefit much from the class.

A year or two after that, I began teaching out of my own home through a smaller non-profit organization, and eventually I simply became self-employed. I tell my students now that I didn’t really learn to play guitar until I’d been teaching it for awhile! But mostly, I learned how to teach.

These days, a lot of students come to me after having either tried to teach themselves, or having a friend or a family member try to teach them, and they blame themselves for not being able to learn in those situations. The truth is that we all learn differently, and just because your brother can pick up a guitar and teach himself, doesn’t mean he can teach you!

Teaching, for me, is about making a connection with a person and then learning how to communicate with them what they need to do. Some people learn more visually, others learn more by ear, and for many it’s a combination of things that lead to understanding how to do it. Not only that, but playing an instrument is a physical experience, and for many, holding it for the first few times feels completely foreign. Then there are the sore fingers and strange hand cramps that come with creating those strange little chord shapes at first.

My job, besides the instruction part, is to give a lot of positive encouragement. Some people are very nervous, most are self-deprecating, but there are those who are particularly hard on themselves or impatient at not being able to learn more quickly. Interestingly enough, most kids are not that way. Kids are used to the idea of learning, and they generally don’t care as much about making mistakes, so most of them just plow through and do their best. But as adults, we have different, and higher, expectations of ourselves. We just want to be able to pick it up and play, and although there are those who can do exactly that, it’s the exception rather than the rule.  And how we squirm at the idea of making a “bad noise”!

A lot of people talk about how nervous they feel, and I completely understand that. A few years ago, I took an adult piano class for the first time, and it was really good for me to be the student for awhile, and to experience that nervousness and “feeling stupid”! I try to remember that feeling every time a student expresses his or her anxiety. The most extreme case happened many years ago, when I had a student who would not play in front of me. She simply asked me to show her how to play something, and then she’d go home and apparently play it herself. I say “apparently” because I never once heard her play! She only took lessons for a short while because even our arrangement made her too anxious. So when a students tells me about their anxiety, I can relate that story as a way of hopefully make them feel like it’s not so bad!

I’ve been told that one of my strengths is my easy going nature, and my emphasis has always been on having fun with playing. There is nothing more satisfying than when I see a student have an “aha!” moment…when they see their playing improve or when their fingers suddenly “know” what they’re doing.  But if you’re not having fun with it at least some of the time, then learning the guitar isn’t worth it as far as I’m concerned!  I always try to meet people first to see if we’re a good fit, and I encourage people to do that with anyone they are looking at as a prospective teacher. I don’t teach classical or jazz or theory, so there’s no point in taking on a student who is interested in that. But it’s also about the personality and teaching style. I’ve heard a few stories over the years about other teachers to know that some of them don’t really know what they’re doing.  If you want to teach, then learn how to!

I’m lucky that what I teach is something that makes people feel good. And I never stop learning. Even my recent experience will still be a lesson to me, something that will make me even more conscious and sensitive to the people who give me the great pleasure of teaching them.

IJ
https://www.irenejackson.com/guitar/

It was a sunny, late spring afternoon in 1972 when I arrived home from school to find a mysterious box sitting on the kitchen table. My Dad was outside working in the garden, as he typically was every spring and summer.

When I walked up to the table and read the label on the top of box, I was startled. “Herein lie the remains of Fanny H. Jackson”.

I stared at it for a long time. My curiosity compelled me to want to open the box, to see what human ashes actually look like. But I was scared. I was not quite 15 years old and still grieving the death of my mother only a month or so earlier, and to think that all that was left of her was in that cardboard box was almost too much to bear.

But my curiosity eventually won and I removed the tape and slowly lifted the lid.

Just a couple of weeks ago, forty-three years after discovering my mothers ashes, I found myself sitting in the back yard under the gazebo with my two daughters, holding an urn, this time with my father’s ashes. We had each decided to write a letter to him which we planned to burn and mix in with his ashes before we took him to the place where he wanted them scattered. Neither of my daughters had ever seen ashes before, and they were a little leery about them just as I had been all those years ago. We started our little burning ceremony and then spoke about what we had written. I mentioned how I written to my Dad that he was a good father, and one of my daughters said she wrote that as well, among other things.

It took awhile to get all of the bits of paper to burn up, and my other daughter took a picture as they were burning. When we were sure every last scrap was burned, I started to open the urn. It took a little doing, but I finally got it open and asked the girls if they wanted a look. They were a little surprised at what the ashes looked like, just as I was many years earlier. I expected them to look black or grey, like paper or wood ashes in a fireplace, but of course, they don’t look anything like that.

Eventually we mixed all of the paper ashes from our letters in with my Dad. My youngest daughter looked at the picture she had taken while the notes were burning.  Here is the original picture:

In the upper part of the picture you can see a couple of little bits that hadn’t burned yet.

When she looked more closely at the picture, she was surprised to see the words on one little scrap.

Had we not been talking about it just a minute earlier, it might not have stood out. The fact is that my Dad would often express his concern, especially when I was younger, about whether or not he was a good enough father. Of course he was;  he did everything for me, especially when he became a single parent after my mother died, making my lunches, making sure I got to school, keeping everything around us just as it was when my mother was alive. I could never have imagined a better father.

So as an adult, I took the time to tell him that as many times as I could. And  these two words were the only ones left intact on that little scrap of paper:

Now most of you who have read my blogs know that I’m not a believer in “signs” or messages from above, or anything like that.  But I did take great comfort in seeing those words, which were the most important ones I wanted to tell him.

Our little burning ceremony was the first step in a journey to take my good father home.

All through my early life, my Dad used to talk about Wallace Mountain and Beaverdell. When he was only three or four years old, along with his younger sister, my grandparents moved from Calgary to Beaverdell, B.C. where my grandfather got a job as a silver miner. Their living quarters was a log cabin, one of a number of cabins built by the miners themselves to house their families. It was like a little community up on top of the mountain not far from the mine, and to my Dad it was heaven. They only lived there a few years, but those years stuck with him as he would often tell stories about his time there to anyone who would listen. He would recount how he and his little sister got into all kinds of mischief, playing near the mine when they weren’t supposed to, Dad making a mess of cutting his sister’s hair, and whatever other trouble they could find. There was only an outhouse, of course, and no running water. And in the winter there was plenty of snow, snow that stuck around sometimes until May. He told the story of his little sister once seeing a very small patch of ground through the snow and calling it “summer”.

The families would often visit each other’s log cabins when the miners weren’t working, and sometimes they would hold dances. Someone had an old gramophone, and my Dad recalled how they would moved whatever furniture they had all to one side of the one-room cabin so that the grown ups could dance. Meanwhile, the kids would play like monkeys on the pile of furniture on the other side of the room.

I guess it was tough on the wives of the miners, who would be stuck home with their children in this very remote place for months on end. Dad explained how the wives would sometimes purchase this mysterious bottle of “medicine” that was supposed to help cure them of cabin fever. It was called “Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound”, bound to cure you of all of your ills. Its main ingredient, of course, was alcohol!  In the picture below, you can see my grandparents posing in front of the cabin, and if you look closely to the left, you can see my blonde-haired Dad:

The Jackson Family log cabin.

A closer shot of my grandparents in front of their cabin.

They left Wallace Mountain when my Dad was about 7 years old, when my grandfather decided to try his hand at fruit farming in Peachland, B.C.. It wasn’t until he was in his late 50’s that my Dad and my stepmother made the treck back to Wallace Mountain to search for the old cabin again. They really didn’t think they would find it, but amazingly, they did. It was falling over and pretty much done with but my Dad was thrilled to bits.  He went back a couple of times over the years to see it, but at one point the company closed down the mine, and eventually they blocked off access to the property so it was no longer legal to go up to the mine site.

Dad with a beer in front of the old cabin, late 1970’s.

The entrance to the Bell Silver Mine where his father worked.

In the summer of 2006, I took my Dad, who was now beginning to show early signs of Alzheimer’s, for his last trip up to Beaverdell and Wallace Mountain. On the drive between Osoyoos and Beaverdell, we talked about how he wanted his ashes spread there some day. He had a great deal of trouble remembering a lot of things on that trip, but he was quite happy to see the town again and the old Beaverdell Hotel. I was just happy to be able to bring him back to this place he loved so much, if a little sad to realize it would be his last time.

Dad in Beaverdell, August 2006

He was aware that his ashes might end up at the base of the mountain, given the fact that it was considered trespassing to go up the mountain itself. But it didn’t matter to him.

And so, the day after our little burning ceremony, my daughters and I set off on the trip, stopping first in Osoyoos, B.C. with the idea of making that our base for our mission. And on June 12th, exactly 18 months after my father passed away, we packed up his ashes and got in the car for the drive to Wallace Mountain.

The drive took about two hours. There were some delays because of the highway being upgraded, but we eventually found ourselves in the small spit of the town called Beaverdell. The first time I went to Beaverdell I couldn’t believe how tiny the town was; one of those blink-and-you-will-miss-it places. It has a general store, a little community “hall”, a scattering of houses, and of course the old Beaverdell Hotel, which, I was sad to hear, had burned down in 2011. Wallace Mountain and the Bell Silver Mine is located just up behind the town.

Since we had to use the facilities before our little hike, we decided to purchase a few things at the general store. Then, with my little backpack carrying my Dad’s urn, we started to walk towards the mountain.

Wallace Mountain ahead.

At the base, we were met with plenty of signs, old and new, warning us not to trespass. We had also heard from a couple of sources that there might be cougars and wolves up there somewhere too, so I have to admit I was a little nervous about our trek.

But we peeked over our shoulders to see that no one was looking and crawled through the big yellow gate at the start of the gravel road, which was pretty much overgrown and hadn’t seen any traffic in quite awhile.

I wasn’t planning on going too far up, but we trudged on for awhile and I kept looking for the right spot. Every now and then we heard a sound in the woods to the right of us and we looked at each other a little nervously.

At one point I saw a bit of a gully with some wild flowers that I thought might be nice. But my youngest daughter wasn’t as impressed, so we trudged on. Finally she said she was going to run up ahead around a bend, and see what was there. Off she went, while my other daughter and I stopped to rest.

Finally, she came back claiming she had found the perfect spot, which, she said, was a little pine tree just to the side of the gravel road. We followed her up around the bend and she pointed out the tree. When I pulled out Dad’s urn, I realized it looked a lot like the surrounding area.

The pine tree and the urn.

We all agreed it was the perfect spot. I fussed with the urn, which, as you can see, was a cylinder shape, made of really heavy cardboard, a lot more interesting than the simple box my mother’s ashes arrived in.

I finally got it open and that’s when it hit me. He was home.

Somewhere on this mountain my Dad had spent the happiest days of his life, and now everything had come full circle.

I spread the ashes all around the base of the pine tree and cried.

My daughter pulled out her iPhone. I thought she was going to take another picture, but instead she played an old song that my Dad used to sing and laugh about all the time called “I Wish I Was Single Again”. He was even known to sing it to the nurses at his care facility! The three of us laughed and sang along with it, all the way through. It was just the right thing to do.

After a time, my daughter took a little snip of the pine tree and we turned around and made our way back down.

As we were walking along the road leading away from Wallace Mounain, I turned around to look at it one last time and said “Bye, Pop.” And just as we started walking again, a huge gust of wind came up, surprising us with its velocity, as if Dad was sending us all on our way.