One of My Students

(Personal blog post)

One of my students is this little Malay Muslim kid.

He's a bright and excitable fellow, somewhat emo and angsty at times, but that's common these days. It makes teaching him the conventional way somewhat impossible, so lessons with him are more about giving more music and playing exposure rather than explaining to him the nuts-and-bolts of music in a way other 7-year-olds can understand.

He says the darnedest things. One day, in the midst of the lesson he said "We worship the normal God; you Chinese worship the Chinese God". I wanted to ask him "Are you saying that my God is not normal?" but decided that he wasn't quite ready for such exercises in logic. I wasn't offended by what he said, I found it amusing and cute.

Well, he IS only seven, right?

Recently I was working with him on a song that was stored in the keyboard he was using. Kalinka, a Russian folk song. He really enjoyed it, I guess all kids would have fun with the mood changes within one song! Just to give him some perspective, I went over to Youtube on my phone and dug up a video for him.



He pretty much went crazy over this video, and kept watching it over and over again. I was commenting to his dad that he may one day grow up to have a fetish for Russian women. His dad took a look at that video and then told me, "It's OK. There are Muslims over in Russia. It does mean, however, that one day you may get an invitation to a wedding held in Siberia..."

By this time, however the kid in question had already moved on to other videos, such as this one...

There's something weird about seeing an army of Russian soldiers passionately singing about snowberries and raspberries, right?

Anyway, that's some of the stuff that comes out during my day-to-day teaching. *shrug* I can't say life is boring!