I felt privileged to have studied the Suzuki System at Eastman. I used BOTH the Suzuki System in my school program for beginners, and the Traditional Violin Teaching System for my intermediate and advanced students.

I used to spend a lot of extra lesson time training the parents. Even watching a lesson, bringing a tape recorder and taking volumes of notes at the lessons, the parents commented that when they got home, their own lack of experience did not make up for a real DETAILED manual which would make them feel secure and certain that they got it correct.

At this time, I also became aware of a "fact" accepted by many teachers and even parents: that it was not unusual for a large amount of children to quit music at the stage of starting to learn note reading. Instinctively, this was not something I believed had to be true!

I also found myself in the position of creating a youth symphony with a group of one and two-year Suzuki students who couldn't read a note. It made absolutely no sense to give them the music pages to the songs they had already played, with a brief introduction to note reading, and basically just "let" them "figure it out." This was the method of practice in vogue that was being used by a lot of teachers at that time to teach music reading. There was no step-by-step note reading system available. How could a teacher have control over which note symbol the child had learned and which one he or she hadn't, and which one needed drilling?

All children learn at different levels. These students needed REAL EFFECTIVE help on how to read music notes. So I created a system of hand-out pages presenting only one note at a time until all the notes were fully covered. And then I drilled the students over and over on the material until they MASTERED it.

When I taught note reading one step at a time, NONE of my students quit.

If this system could work for note reading, why couldn't it work for every aspect of Violin Teaching?