A Teacher with Vision
Music was a source of joy in my Aunt Irene’s life. She shared it with thousands of people through her pipe organ performances and teaching piano lessons. I have numerous stories about my own experiences with Irene and my own musical work with both the piano and the flute, and I was lucky enough to have played a number of flute pieces with her piano accompaniment just six months before she died. My favorite story, though, is one my aunt told me in the week before her death.
One day, one of Irene’s former students, now a mom, called to ask Irene to teach her son piano lessons. The boy, Jonathan, had been diagnosed with autism when he was three, and his parents hoped that music would be a pathway for him to focus on something he loved and possibly even connect with others.
Irene, of course, took Jonathan on as a piano student even though at the outset she had no idea how she would teach an autistic child. But if any piano teacher on earth could teach Jonathan, it was Irene. First, she had to get his attention.
At the first lesson, Jonathan was frightened and laid on the floor refusing to budge. Irene played the piano a little bit while she talked to Jonathan, but she could not talk him up off the floor. Then she had a flash of inspiration. She turned on the metronome.
The back-and-forth motion and tick-tock sound of the metronome gave Jonathan a constant that enabled him to go sit at the piano to learn. How cool is that?!?
The following is a recent article about Irene’s work with her autistic student printed in the “Dahlin Dateline,” the monthly newsletter for a faith organization called EFCA that Jonathan’s parents are a part of.
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A Teacher with Vision
by Tim & Carolyn Dahlin
With the discovery of Jonathan’s perfect pitch when he was in 4th grade, we were inspired to start him on piano lessons. So, just as his mother (Carolyn) and his two siblings had done, he started lessons with Mrs. Irene Olson. She was in her 70s at the time, but she was not going to be discouraged either by her age or by our son’s disability [autism]. And so began eight and a half years of teaching Jonathan to play the piano.
Mrs. Olson had a vision for Jonathan. She knew that music could be a wonderful tool to help Jonathan mentally and emotionally, and she saw that he had the ability to do wonderful things with music. She studied and prayed about how to teach piano to this student with autism. Week after week Mrs. Olson came up with tools to pull out the music that is in Jonathan. Year after year he was introduced to more difficult music, and he proved up to the task.
This determined teacher would never settle for sloppiness; she would not let him get by with less than she knew he was capable of. As a result of her determined efforts, Jonathan has blessed many hearts with his music and he has developed the confidence to take on difficult tasks. We give this tribute of Jonathan’s piano teacher, in part, because she passed away from cancer ten days after Jonathan’s senior recital. We praise the Lord that she was able to be at this recital and play a lovely arrangement of “Blessed Assurance.” Mrs. Olson’s story is a wonderful example of a teacher drawing out the potential in her students.