I’ve spent the bulk of my adult working life teaching people how to do things. Mostly I’ve taught them piano, eartraining, music theory, music history, music literature, and various other subjects. I’ve also flirted around pedagogically with a bevy of other subjects, including Buddhist philosophy and computer languages.
Unlike some musicians who teach to support a composition habit or because they just can’t make ends meet on whatever they eke out as performers, I am a teacher first and foremost by choice and by temperament. By whatever combination of nature and nurture I have a knack for the craft. People may have questioned my methods sometimes, but my suitability never. I have been a teacher from the get-go; I know it, and that knowledge makes me happy.
After three-plus decades in the saddle I can make reasonably astute observations about teachers and teaching, even if my opinions might not be shared by all members of my profession—or, for that matter, by anyone who has ever been around a teacher, meaning everyone. Nonetheless, I offer a few random thoughts.
I am not an educator. Educators are people who get on about teaching; teachers are people who actually do it. I have no truck with educators. Their statistics bore me, their concerns mystify me, their inconsiderate assaults on the English language offend me. Educators are apt to blather on about evaluative outcomes or assessment, whatever the hell that means, and their emphases never seem to include anything remotely resembling anything I would recognize as teaching. Fortunately they inhabit a parallel universe to our own and rarely rub elbows with real teachers save the occasional officious venue. There isn’t a veteran teacher alive who hasn’t figured out the rules of engagement: show them what they want to see, tell them what they want to hear, smile, and wait for them to leave.
Formal methodologies are neutral. By this I refer to those formalized ways of teaching particular subjects, such as the various systems in use for teaching solfege. Experience has made it clear that no method is inherently superior or inferior to any other; it all lies in the teacher who wields the method. Methodologies are, to borrow a favorite Zen phrase, fingers pointing at the moon; they are not the moon itself.
Sometimes it’s all about knowing when to stop. I’ve observed quite a few teachers at work, partly as a member of peer review committees, and also in my occasional capacity as mentor to developing teachers. One of the lessons that can be toughest for a young teacher to learn is when to back off. This requires keeping a light finger on the classroom pulse, always evaluating if the students are ready to press forward, or if a little “Story Time” might be in order. Certainly there is nothing more revealing of an inept teacher than a class turned passively unresponsive while the teacher pounds, hammers, and cajoles away.
It isn’t about me. Taking things personally is an occupational hazard and a danger that none of us ever completely escape. Nonetheless, a student’s lack of progress is not ipso facto our own personal failing, nor are we all that responsible for a student’s success. It is our students who do the learning, not us. We guide, we lead, we point, we inspire, we protect, we discipline, we organize, we test. But they do the learning. We may take appropriate pride in the quality of the education we offer, naturally. But I am not my students, and they are not me.
Burnout is insidious. Most teachers have gone far down the road to burnout long before they ever recognize the symptoms. Burnout happens as experience morphs into unconsciousness; we’ve done it so many times before that we go on autopilot and stop having any new ideas. We must always seek new ways to do things, come up with new materials, even plunge into teaching things we’ve never done before.
Teaching is fun. It’s major, serious, way-cool fun, a daylong party that offers rush upon rush.
Teaching is thrilling. A student enters my classroom without a particular skill or area of knowledge. He or she leaves with that skill or that knowledge. It’s potentially life-changing, but even if it isn’t, I gave that person that gift. Santa Claus is always depicted as jolly because he’s always giving gifts; teachers are the gift-givers par excellence.