A Musical Man--Richard Perkins

Richard Perkins has dedicated 59 of his 63 years of life to music.

Perkins has been teaching music courses at ARCC for 37 years. In full, he has been teaching one form of music or another for 42 years. At the ARCC Coon Rapids campus, he is currently teaching Music Theory, Advanced Music Theory, Aural Comprehension and Advanced Aural Comprehension, but he has taught every music course ARCC offers, at one time or another.

Although his wife isn’t in the music business, she does love music and helps Perkins frequently. He admits that he has to thank her for lending him many of her CDs for his Rock and Roll History course.

Before ARCC, Perkins taught at Amery, Wis. He taught a variety of different classes, including music for Special Education, jazz, elementary music, middle school choir, high school band, and swing choir. “It was a wonderful way to start my music career,” Perkins said, “because I experienced so many different levels of music education right away.”

His aunt, Viora Perkins, was a piano teacher, so Perkins began learning to play the piano at the early age of four. In Spooner, Wis., the town he grew up in, the band program allowed children to start learning an instrument in the fourth grade. When Perkins followed his fifth grade brother, Mike, to band one day, the teacher gave him a coronet and told him to sit down and play. Perkins was eight and not technically old enough to learn an instrument, but he said, “I’ve been playing the trumpet every since.”

His school also had an orchestra program, so he started on the violin, but progressed much faster than his classmates. “Maybe I thought it was too easy,” Perkins said, “so I stopped playing the violin and stayed with the trumpet.”

As far as his teaching style goes, Perkins realizes that every student learns a different way than those around him/her. He tries to cater to the many ways students learn by offering a variety of teaching styles. Some of these include visual, aural, and tactile methods. Overall, he simply wants to help students to understand music and love it as much as he does.

Perkins told me that the way in which he teaches constantly changes. If a student doesn’t understand what he is trying to teach, he attempts to help that student to learn by teaching in a different manner. “If one way doesn’t work, then I try another way,” he said simply.