Mrs. Joan Diener has been teaching strings at LJCDS for more than thirty years, drawing from a lifetime love for music and decades of performance. Mrs. Diener moved to San Diego in 1987 to pursue her Master of the Arts degree with emphasis in Suzuki method pedagogy at San Diego State University. In 1990, she was recommended by her professor to start a strings program at La Jolla Country Day School. She was initially hesitant to take the position, as she was busy traveling between three different schools to teach music, but she had always wanted to start a strings program somewhere. After visiting Country Day, Mrs. Diener immediately loved the campus, faculty, and students. Mrs. Diener has been a dedicated strings educator for Country Day ever since.
When she was in kindergarten, Mrs. Diener begged her parents for a piano until she finally got one in first grade. Her mother was her first piano teacher. In third grade, a strings teacher came to her class to recruit students, she went home and asked for a violin, to which her mother said: “You don’t even practice the piano enough, why do you want to try the violin?” to which she replied “do you really want to deprive me of the opportunity that you had as a child?” and so she was allowed to play the violin.
By the time she was in high school, Mrs. Diener was involved in choir, orchestra, and band. According to Mrs. Diener, this wide variety of instruments and musical experiences helped her be a music teacher. In high school, she thought, “Well of course I have to go into music because that’s what I’ve done forever.” She had wanted to be a teacher and a performer since she was young, which led her to pursue two bachelor’s degrees in a five-year program in college, one in music education and one in performance. Mrs. Diener has performed with the San Diego Symphony as a substitute violinist and has done several gigs on the viola.
For her first five years at Country Day, Mrs. Diener was the only instrumental teacher. She taught a pull-out program where students left class for private or buddy lessons for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. This was no easy feat. Mrs. Diener taught over 100 students per week, bringing breakfast, lunch and dinner in a bag and eating quickly between lessons with barely any breaks. Mrs. Diener loved being able to teach all different age groups. Some lifelong musicians at Country Day had Mrs. Diener for a full fourteen years. Mrs. Diener now teaches only lower and upper school strings after instruments became a requirement for 5th and 6th graders and the school hired dedicated middle school music teachers. Mrs. Diener is good friends with all the music educators at Country Day, and says, “one of my favorite parts of teaching is having people I really care about to work with.” Mrs. Diener is incredibly happy with where the Country Day music program is at now, the only change she might make is recruiting more students in the upper school orchestra or having more 7th and 8th-grade students continue to play their instruments in upper school.
The only styles of music Mrs. Diener disliked were country and opera, but after growing to love both, she now says she loves almost every style of music. She likes listening to hit list music on the way to school, saying, “Classical has many fine details that are hard to hear over freeway noise.”
Outside of music, Mrs. Diener likes doing Russian kettlebell workouts, playing pickleball, and dancing. Mrs. Diener has been dancing for 25 years, with experience in salsa, bachata, and ballroom dancing. Her current focus is West Coast swing dancing, which she describes as “good exercise and a wonderful way to meet people.”
When asked what she thought many of her students ought to know, she said, “I think it’s so important for students to follow their passion. If music is their passion, they should really go for it, and it’s awesome when students continue in college. Even if they don’t major in it, if they still take their instrument to college and can play, that makes me so happy.”
