Spoiler: very little of it is just about the violin.

Yes, there are scales, concertos, auditions, competitions, crooked bows, collapsing wrists, and an absolutely unreasonable amount of time spent discussing someone’s pinky. But teaching a child to play an instrument means teaching a child, and children come with confidence, fear, ambition, boredom, perfectionism, parents, adolescence, anxiety, enormous feelings, questionable practice habits, and the occasional complete meltdown over four measures of Bach.

Drawing on more than two decades of teaching students and mentoring teachers around the world, Elizabeth talks about how children actually learn, why some practice and some absolutely do not, what motivation really looks like, what happens when talented kids become teenagers, and how parents can help without making everyone insane.

There will be stories, psychology, education, opinions acquired the hard way, and probably more discussion of children’s thumbs than any podcast reasonably needs.