Personal Review Of Singing, An Article By Abigail Lipson

When I was growing up I feared failing. The worst part of failing was that I could usually tell I had already failed before it was over. I would get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach or not having complete faith in the work I did makes me not have faith in my work. Public speaking by myself is the biggest fear that I have, I can do almost any speech or presentation if I am in a group. Singing is one of my passions and I love for people to hear me, but not by myself. My world comes crashing down when I want to try out for a solo because I want the part more than anything but the crippling fear of people watching me makes my nerves run wild and I psych myself out more than I need to. This happened too many times throughout my chorus

In my later years of high school, I really took to this idea of learning from the mistakes. I became more confident in singing, at least to my peers in class. In high school I never did get a solo in my chorus class, but I no longer looked at it as failing but more as a learning experience on how to better my self-confidence. I started to practice more, and I became better at being aware of the warning signs that I was becoming too nervous, such as voice shaking, sweaty palms and hands shaking. I learned to control these signs. My voice still wavers when I hold out long notes in a solo, but what I have gotten better at is being able to stop my hands from shaking as bad as they used to while I’m in the middle of the song. I have learned to focus on my breathing and less on the notes that I am trying to hit. Being able to keep my hands from shaking has also helped me when it comes to public speaking, while it does tend to still happen I can keep it from being obvious to my audience which comes across as more confidence then I

The teacher started off saying that the assignment was going to be rigorous and most of us will most likely get “C’s” on this paper but for her grading purposes that is a good grade. This was shocking to me; how could a teacher be satisfied giving students a “C”? She was notorious for these types of grades, forcing us to learn with intent. I had never received a grade lower than a “B” before, so naturally my first thought was that she was not directing that statement to me. She doesn’t know how good of a writer I am, I’m going to be the one that gets a 100 and everyone will be jealous of me. That was in fact not the case, I was in for a rude awakening when we got our grades back for that paper. I had received a grade of 73. I was devastated, I thought that I did well. I talked to the teacher after class and she asked what the problem was. I told her I thought I did well on the paper how could I get a low grade on it? She explained that it was a well written paper and I did exactly what she asked. The reason I received the grade that I did was for that exact reason, writing a good paper. The teacher felt that I was writing the paper to get a good grade instead of writing to learn something or teach something to the reader. From this experience I took that I needed to stop trying to be perfect, and focus on being a successful student. I took this new found focus and applied it not only