For those of you who know me well, the following will not surprise you. For the rest, well, welcome to the murky waters of my psyche.
Piano lessons were foisted upon me by my parents when I was 5 years old. It was not a choice - lessons were mandatory in our household until junior high, at which point you could choose quit. I did not and continued on through high school. My middle sister continued on into college and graduated with a degree in music education (after years of teaching ingrates, she's seeking gainful employment in another related field). All this to say that while I do have a degree of talent, I run short on technical perfection. I do well with what I have and have no drive to become a concert pianist.
I have always been a pretty good accompanist. I sight-read well, can change timing and keys with relative ease, and can generally "go with the flow" (ask the soloists I've accompanied that have gotten themselves "lost" in a piece of music). My downfall is the area of solo piano. My nervous system can't handle the overload. Forget about butterflies in the stomach - they become bats with 6-foot wingspans. I'm a disaster prior to the solo. While I can pull it together to get through the solo (with much difficulty, I might add), the aftermath is even worse than the precursor. Best case scenario is a dazed state. Most often, I am found in a quiet corner, far away from everyone, sobbing my heart out and physically shaking. It's not because I fouled up - usually, the piece was near-flawless. I'm just one big case of nerves when it comes to solos, which is why I typically only do 1 per year.
I received a phone call about 2 weeks ago, asking if I would participate in a praise concert at our church, scheduled for this past Sunday. The music director wanted to know if I was planning on becoming part of this church's music ministry (which I was) and thought it would be a good idea for me to join in on the concert. After several days passed, I called her back and told her that I'd gotten a group together and I would accompany them (Bob, his sister and her husband).
I was getting very nervous once Sunday rolled around. This was unusual, given the fact that I was accompanying, not soloing. Several factors were working against me: this was my first time playing for a new congregation and the congregation is at least 3 times as large as our previous one. To top it all off, about an hour before the program started, a visiting college student was "tinkering" on the piano and broke out into various Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt pieces. This guy was a concert pianist! This added a megadose of fertilizer to my pre-existing and growing inferiority complex (this complex is far better fed than some grapevines).
By the time I had to get up to the piano, my breathing was erratic, my hands were shaking and I had significant difficulty focusing on the music. I am told that I did well, but I can't remember any of it. While I did not break into tears, I did get lost in a dazed state. I was so wrung out that I was asleep by 9PM (normal is midnight) and slept straight through to 7 AM Monday morning.
It is now Tuesday and I'm still feeling the effects. I'm waking up very sleepy, as if I haven't had any rest at all. My mind has difficulty focusing on just about any task. Worst of all, I'm feeling like I never want to touch a piano again - from the sense that I've sustained some sort of trauma and from the sense that I really don't play well enough to be doing this at all. My inner voice keeps telling me that there are plenty of others that are far more qualified than I am to do the job, of which there are a quite a few in our new church.
This is where I'm at.
So whose problem is this, anyway? 
Rote memorization has its place. It is particularly useful in introducing new or abstract concepts when the intended student has no background information to which they can link the new data (i.e. - having young children memorize the symbols that make up their language’s alphabet). However, this method of teaching has its limits - it very rarely is able to affix the new information in the person’s long-term memory and it doesn’t explain the “why’s”.
Rote memorization was a standard part of my elementary years, especially in math and music. The most boring part of math was the mutliplication tables. On Fridays, we were given a very fast-paced quiz where the questions were shot out at you: 3×4, 3×9, 3×1, 3×7, etc. You had seconds to write your answer before the next question came. Afterwards, the quizzes were collected to be graded over the weekend. Following the quiz was next week’s memorization assignment: this week you did the 3’s, next week you had to memorize the 4’s (up to 12).
