FinishMySong Blog

I've got to admit that the job of teaching piano, guitar and singing can be frustrating for more than practical reasons. For a start, there's the ethical issue of whether or not it's right to devote all my time to helping people learn a skill that is, when all is said and done, often considered no more important than any other fun pastime. This consideration sometimes overwhelms me, especially at times like I've had over the past couple of weeks when I've found myself visiting hospitals full of staff dedicating their time to the wellbeing of others. These people presumably consider what they do of greater importance than any musical activity but I console myself by trying to consider what the world would be like without art and music. Perhaps we could all go on in full health, hearts beating and lungs filling and emptying each second, but we'd be infinitely poorer for losing the means to express ourselves. I once wrote that "music is society" and this is why it's important for people to continue in the tradition of teaching and learning the skills required to keep a healthy musical society as well as healthy bodies.

So, then, it has to be acknowledged that the act of playing an instrument or singing is not just about the technical means of producing sounds at certain pitches, but actually about creating something that is worthwhile both personally and as part of society at large. This idea alone means that my job as a music teacher is not as straightforward as it might first seem - there are so many different views out there of what does and does not constitute 'good' playing, whatever that is, and how it is achieved, not to mention the thousands of musical genres, styles, approaches to composition and musical arrangement. Then the teaching styles offered by each tutor differ greatly. For example, a friend of mine was telling me recently that she takes weekly piano lessons that rotate between two subject areas: the playing of pieces and the practise / perfection of scales. Her teacher sits with her to play nothing but scales for an entire lesson one week then the next week dispenses with the warm-ups and goes cold straight into the Mozart, or whatever. Now, I find this a peculiar way of going about teaching piano, but who am I to say whether this is more or less effective than the way I teach, incorporating pieces and exercises into all my lessons? More to the point, can my method work better with some people and my friend's teacher's approach work better for others?

Rhiannon Schmitt covers these dilemmas in her article about the decision to teach music, called So You Want to be a Music Teacher? The crooks of her point seems to be that sitting down with people who are learning an instrument is much more challenging than many non-teaching people would think; it requires patience, careful planning and the willingness to scrap everything that you just planned at the drop of a hat if you realise that you're trying to force a square block into a round hole. The truth is that I can be very hard on myself when I perceive a student's lack of progress as a failing on my part, and reading Rhiannon's article really helped me to find a sense of perspective in all this: the skills I'm trying to teach are hugely complicated. They cannot be learned overnight, so a music teacher needs to be patient both over the period of a single lesson when a student may be struggling with something but also in the long term; to realise that mastering these skills can take many years and each student will learn at their own pace according to their level of innate ability and commitment to the task. But, rest assured that if you give the student enough guidance and allow them the time they need to pull it together, it will mostly work out good in the end, one way or another. I'll try to bear this in mind in the coming months and years!