I ‘ve been thinking more about the whole “doing-teaching” thing, maybe because this week was the first week of the school year, and I’ve got a bunch of piano students trickling in after a summer spent doing everything under the sun — EXCEPT piano.
Those of us who choose to teach — acting coaches, writing instructors, visual arts teachers, music teachers — do it for many reasons. Some of us teach for the pure enjoyment of it. For some of us, it’s a way of giving back, or participating in the time-honored chain of instruction that links us with our teachers, with their teachers, and their teachers, back into history (There’s a piano teacher in my town who can trace her musical genealogy all the way back to Beethoven!) For many of us, teaching is a way to interact with the community and to help us combat the solitude that is so often part of the creative process. And for some, it’s income we can count on.
But no matter why we teach, or what we teach, I think many of us face the same challenges. Most of us who became skilled at our crafts have put countless hours into them because we love doing it. But I think it’s safe to say that a large percent of us became musicians or artists or whatever because we had some sort of innate talent for our art to begin with.
I remember being taught to read music at the age of 7. My teacher showed me the black notes and white notes on the piano, explained their patterns and how they were named. He then pointed to a note on a staff and announced it was a “C.” That day I learned C, D, E, F, and G. And that was it: After that, I could read music. If you talk to other musicians, you’ll find that this isn’t all that unusual.
But it IS unusual for “average” students to “get it” that quickly, and I think that’s the crux of the whole “Can do can’t teach” issue. Most of us are prone to teaching the way we were taught, without considering that the way WE were taught might have been suitable for a highly motivated or talented student. We can’t necessarily teach all our students the way we learned: Our students aren’t us. In order to learn to teach kids (or adults) who don’t have an innate feel for our art, we have to learn to look at it in a whole new way. We have to look for what the student’s roadblock is to understanding, and we have to find creative ways to solve that problem, even if we’ve never experienced it ourselves. And the earlier we learn this simple truth in our teaching careers, the less frustrating it will be — for us AND our students.
