Saturday’s (9/28) Wall Street Journal includes an essay by Joanne Lipman on the subject of her book Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations, published October 1 by Hyperion. Along with the book’s co-author, Melanie Kupchynsky—now a violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—Lipman as a child studied and played under a “fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky.… He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil. Today, he’d be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years’ worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola.… I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was equally struck by the success of his former students. Some were musicians, but most had distinguished themselves in other fields, like law, academia and medicine.… What did Mr. K do right? What can we learn from a teacher whose methods fly in the face of everything we think we know about education today, but who was undeniably effective?” An excerpt from Strings Attached appeared 9/30 on the website chicagotonight.wttw.com.
Posted October 2, 2013
