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We’ve all heard people say it, maybe we’ve even said it ourselves…

But is it true?

Let’s see, Beethoven had students. Chopin had students, Franz Liszt had students.  The great Renaissance painters had studios full of students (although they were probably more likely to call them apprentices). My friend, the actress Karen Allen teaches acting at a college, my just-after-college room-mate, the solo piccolo recording and concert artist Susan Glaser studied with a flutist from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the great, late writer Wallace Stegner taught writing for many years at Stanford….. and I didn’t even have to pause a moment to list all of those, and I can keep going, and going.

In other words, baloney.

The arts have a long tradition of master artists passing their art and their craft down to the next generation. Some of them are highly selective, picking trained students who come to them with a track record of practice and achievement. Others prefer to take on young beginners, in the hope of molding them right from the start. But the history of artistic endeavor is also the history of teaching.

Here’s something else about teaching: It can make you a better artist. I have taught both writing and piano, and in both cases, it has made me a better writer and a better musician.

In the writing workshops I sometimes teach at the local commuinity college, I meet students who have a whole different way of looking at things. They have angles on story ideas, and their angles give me angles, and half the time I end a class, I head straight to the computer to pitch a story I’d never even thought of before.

Teaching piano involves sightreading on a daily basis, as well as listening skills. Answering student’s questions about how a phrase should be shaped or how to decide on dynamics can bring up other questions that I can apply to my own playing. 

I remember back in college, studying music, we then-20-year-olds used to think of teaching as “something to fall back on” if we didn’t succeed as performers. Little did we know… the tradition of passing on our knowledge, one student at a time, is the lifeblood of the arts. And it gives us back what we put into it.