I had a student today ask me about how to properly produce vibrato. I was momentarily stumped. I really never thought about it before, and I had to pause for a bit to think about it. In the past I have had this problem with questions about left-hand muting, and a good 95% of right hand technique. I don’t think about much as far as technique goes, I just do it.
It took becoming a teacher to realize the answers to some of these expression-based questions, that to me were just natural answers to reproducing the tones I heard on records. No one taught me how how to mute a string. I heard a James Brown record and I liked how short the notes were and discovered that by resting my fingers across the strings, the notes became shorter– and at the time I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it!!
So what am I getting at? Well, on one hand I feel like my lessons shouldn’t just be about theory and ear training, but about the bits and pieces that make music so amazing. Expression. That is the thing, that I’d imagine in any subject, is the most difficult to teach, but I think it’s really what separates a good teacher from the rest, and I am not sure I am equipped to teach a 16 year old kid how to express himself.
My lessons, thus far, have been about enabling a beginning student with the tools he or she needs to teach themselves. Some teachers really lay it on with “proper technique.” The only rules I am stickler about are usually related the to left hand and even then only for the sake of efficiency. My lesson goals consist mostly of learning songs from records, reading notation and chord symbols, knowing the chords & arpeggios in any given scale and, most importantly, knowing how to apply all of these skills to a band situation. I think, for the most part, that’s a solid working philosophy for any music teacher. I just don’t know if all of those things are really what music is all about.
i had a similar experience when i was teaching music theatre history. when it came to properly critiquing musicals, i couldn’t explain to them that it was more than a paper about the characters, plot, stage direction, etc. a good critique was about the way the show moved and how it moved others. it was about expression and at what expense?
it isn’t you are a bad teacher. in fact, i think you are a better teacher having learned this lesson. now you can begin exploring how to open the minds of students to begin to explore and understand their own voice.
Yeah, I think you learned the most valuable lesson, Justin. That is that you can never know it all and you have to simply continue being aware and learning new things every day. One can only begin to teach when this realization is met. Learning is a process that ongoing, and it takes our awareness of what we “know”, broken down to very basic concepts, and communicated efficiently to be able to pass on that knowledge to another. I think when the “learner” has a “lightbulb” moment, that is when the “teacher” has accomplished something. However, the role as teacher never negates being a learner. There is something new on the horizon all the time! Keep up the good work! P.s. I miss the Whiskerino stuff. I kept up with it every day, and I’m going through withdrawal.
I appreciate the comments from both of you. I was in the depths of a fever when I wrote that post, and I don’t know if it makes sense. I think I failed to make my quandry clear. I think I was attempting to say three or four things at once. The main question I think I was asking was this:
Is it really my job to answer every question a student asks me?
When you teach, you think that it is your job to answer your students questions, but often I feel like they should take some time to figure things out on their own. Some of the most valuable characteristics of my “musical personality” have come from my own discoveries. Does providing an answer to every question rob them of a chance of really connecting to the music and the art on their own?
I have to admit that I found your post a little confusing, but I had figured I’m just not knowledgable enough about music theory to know.
As to the question you put in your comment above, the answer is easy: good god, no! Your job is to help them figure out how to learn for themselves. There certainly are questions that deserve straightforward answers from you, but there are others that are better left unanswered. Unless your job as a teacher really is radically different from mine, your job is more about asking them questions than answering them.