Thirty-three years is a long time to be a teacher. To have gotten this far without burnout is downright remarkable. But that’s my situation; I just wrapped up another year in the pedagogical saddle with my enthusiasm intact and no sense whatsoever of wanting to pack it in. I wouldn’t say that I begin every single morning with a sense of high adventure; I have my on days and off days. But on the whole I enjoy it more than I ever did, I find more challenge in it than I ever did, and I find it more gratifying than I ever did. I’m not altogether sure why that is—or if I really want to know why that is—but I can point to a few attributes that have kept me charging along well into my fourth decade at the head of a classroom.
Preparation
I’m a preparation nut, a planner and plotter and picky polisher. I never give off-the-cuff lectures; instead, I may invest in a 10-to-1 ratio of prep versus delivery time. Given my heavy teaching and lecturing schedule, such an insistence on pre-planning means that my evenings and weekends are booked solid. But it’s worth it for any number of reasons. Most importantly, my students and audiences are likely to respond with heightened attention, since extensive preparation shows in ways both overt and subtle. A wealth of carefully chosen and edited musical examples, entertaining and creative visual presentations, and a worked-out arc of delivery with a clear beginning, middle, and end all make clear that I care deeply about quality. But the preparation also shows in a relaxed attitude towards time, given that I know that it’s all going to fit comfortably within the alloted time, or if it doesn’t, I’ve already thought about the material I can skip.
Proper preparation ensures that I will not backtrack, jump around, or leave people in the dark. At least not deliberately. Because I’ve thought it all through in advance, I can keep my target audience in mind and make sure that I am custom-tailoring the material to their needs. I won’t wind up confusing symphony audiences with overly technical stuff, nor will I fail to be technical enough for upper-division conservatory theory students. Nor will time be wasted; no hunting around for a CD track or waiting for snail-slow DVD players, no sudden realization that I have forgotten something critical, no shuffling around in my notes looking for that bit of info while class attention dissipates.
Deep preparation also heightens my commitment to the class or lecture in question. Given that I have put in so much advance effort, the presentation becomes something special, something to lose a bit of sleep over, something to get excited about. At this stage of my career I’m not likely to suffer from nervousness, but nonetheless, thorough preparation goes a long way to ameliorate any potential performance anxiety.
Every once in a while I’ll take a class on a voyage of discovery, to show them the process itself. In that case I haven’t so much planned, as I have planned not to plan, such as it were. I restrict such presentations to advanced conservatory classes in analysis or theory, where such impromptu sessions may prove useful. But I plan out when that’s going to happen, and while running through the unplanned session, my mind typically races ahead to ensure that we don’t leave anything hanging. So I remained organized, although less overtly than usual.
Exploration
I’m an enthusiastic proponent of trying out new stuff. I was trained as a pianist, and these days that’s the one thing I hardly do at all. I play only on occasion, and I don’t teach piano beyond a few composition students. Nor have I any regrets. The piano shepherded me along for a while. But I think of the Buddha’s parable of the raft—i.e., you built yourself a raft to get to the other shore, but only an idiot carries the raft around on his head afterwards. That’s where I stand vis-à-vis the piano; it was my raft.
Had I been reluctant to dip my toes in unfamiliar waters, I would never have discovered that I had a gift for public speaking and music commentary. I was shy to the point of terror when I was a kid, after all. Teaching piano does nothing to hone one’s elocution skills. Nor was my relatively limited musical culture up to the challenge of making Notre Dame organum clear to college freshmen, or placing Romantic lieder in a proper musico-literary context, or offering a symphony audience a mini-history of American minimalism. But I managed because I said I would do all that, and I continue to learn about music and composers and idioms. Writing program notes, giving pre-concert lectures, and teaching public music-apprish courses are all wonderful vehicles for expanding one’s musical horizons. As is chairing a music theory department, especially thinking back to that C I got in first-semester music theory at Peabody.
I’m not degree-oriented. I could give a rat’s ass whether a potential teacher in my department has a doctorate or master’s or whatever. I’m concerned entirely about that teacher’s musicianship, his or her teaching ability, and above all, his or her humanity. If that all comes with a sheepskin from some elevated conservatory of university, well and good. But I won’t hire a sheepskin.
Projection
I always try to put myself in my students’ chairs, whether they are undergraduates at Cal or SF Symphony patrons or SFCM graduate students. What do I value in a teacher, what do I not value? Who were the teachers who served as my best role models, and who were the ones who inadvertently taught me what to avoid? Becoming enmeshed in my own agenda or opinions is a quick way to go sailing off the edge. It almost sounds perverse, but making the process less about me winds up making me a lot happier.
That doesn’t mean that I will avoid getting tough or downright unpleasant if necessary, as it sometimes is when dealing with the teenagers who fill one’s lower-division college classrooms. We’re all familiar with 20-going-on-12 syndrome and the need for appropriate discipline. Drill sargeants have their place, but that place isn’t usually a classroom. Most of the time one teaches by extraction, not extortion. Get as many of your students on board by their own volition, and let them take care of the rest. Don’t get hysterical about the ones that will not embark; there will always be some of those, just as there will be overachievers and underachievers and everything in between.
Oy. I just noticed that my three attributes—Preparation, Exploration, Projection—make up the acronym PEP. Not intentional, not intentional at all. It reads as though it came from a nauseatingly perky pamphlet handed out to neophyte teachers facing their first assignment in a tough inner-city middle school.
Oh, well. Let it be, let it be. Still, I flash back on the pilot episode of the iconic Mary Tyler Moore show. Lou Grant interviews Mary for the job of assistant producer of the WJM Evening News. When she lobs his prickly attitude right back at him, he grins and says “Hey! You’ve got spunk!!” Mary smiles and shrugs her shoulders and says, well yes I do, ha ha ha ha. To which Lou growls: “I HATE spunk!!”