No student ever needs to have his or her own sovereignty obliterated in order to learn. None. End of discussion. No teacher should think it's his or her own job to break the student down and then build them up from there.
I remember the teachers who listened to me, who actually cared to know how I was doing, who offered a helping hand and good guidance. These are the teachers I'll never forget. They are the supermans, the superwomans of education. They put up with a whole mess-o-crap in order to teach. They have to do thousands of things outside of the actual educational process. They need to be absolutely on top of it all in order to help out scores of people and handle multiple tasks at one time. It's a hard, heavy, task. I know. I'm a teacher, too.
Some teachers handle that weight by being incredibly brutal to their students. Some teachers stop caring and they collect a check. What about the teachers we remember? These teachers followed a process of encouraging their students think the way that's best for them. In my opinion, a dedicated minority of teachers respect and encourage the sovereignty of their students. When you teach anyone else any subject or skill, you are helping another person who has opened up and admitted that they are weak in an area that you are strong in. How are you going to do it? Are you going to be brutal and make it hard on them to learn, or will you really challenge them by respecting their autonomy as well as your own?
Knowing how to teach something is fun, but there's more to it than simply filling in the blanks.
About seven out of every ten persons who schedule their first guitar lesson tell me something similar. "I'm starting almost completely from nothing. I hope you don't mind beginners. I bought this guitar about two months ago. I bought a book to go with my guitar, but I found it boring after about a week or so. At some point, I looked on the web for easy, beginner, guitar stuff to learn. You know, online guitar lessons. I got pretty frustrated about the lack of anything decent on the web. I realized that there was nothing that was going to help me except finding a teacher. Then I found you." What's interesting to me, as a teacher, is that neither book nor internet helped these people learn. Sure, it was a fun way to jump into guitar, but neither method yielded the results these folks were looking to achieve in terms of progress. It's interesting too to see that this person really wanted to learn, so they bought a guitar and a book. No fault there. The book they got was boring, so they tried Google and YouTube. No fault here either, as there is also great information to be had there as well. But neither source gave them what they were ultimately looking for-progress and skill. Perhaps it's at this point that we all realize we want to learn, and that we need a teacher. That's pretty telling. What fascinated me is this: Why, with all the technology that we have today-the systems, and the approaches-can we not teach guitar remotely?
There are lots of possible reasons why any of these learners get frustrated about learning via books or the web. Much of what is found on the web for guitar education is, well, sub-par. The results? Any disorganized presentation of curriculum is annoying. A philosophy behind why a certain concept is required might be inadequate and flawed. The excercises might be way above or below skill level. There could be huge gaps of ability, resulting in huge barriers that the learner has to recover from. There could be too much information to soak in. The curriculum might not be flexible to meet the needs of the learner. The learner might not be interested in what is being offered. There are a whole host of reasons.
Still, there are thousands of online guitar lesson sites out there. To the guitar teacher, the medium of online guitar lessons has got to seem pretty tempting. "Hey, I'll just systemize what has worked in the past and present in my face-to-face lessons online, somehow. Then, I can replicate this very same lesson four hundred times without breaking a sweat, and make a fortune!"
There is one major flaw: If the teacher is removed from the picture, the commitment to learning is removed as well.
Commitment, Online.
Anyone who used to get online with a dial-up modem back in the glory days of the internet understood that there was a lot of potential for doing something you weren't really allowed to do normally. One could do something without deference to social norms and have no fear of reprimand from a boss, co-worker, spouse, or friend. Anyone who explored the internet in those days understood that having that ability to walk away from any interaction was intregral to why they were there in the first place. To services like AOL or even CompuServe (remember them, anybody?), being anonymous was a major selling point of the experience.
AOL's commercial featuring David Cross hits the idea brilliantly:
When a person is anonymous, they are not accountable for their actions. Being unaccountable for their actions, they could leave at anytime if they violated the norms of whatever service they were taking part in. They could delete an account and start fresh, or just simply leave a chat-room. Although they valued the ability to get online and go search out these services, they were not obliged to go public with their activities. In my own brutal way of saying it, they were uncommitted.
The internet still seems like a place where identity is incredibly vague. I do not want to give the impression that I believe that this is bad. The web is still ripe for random anonymous net surfing opportunities, within reason. There are ample chances to be really, really stupid to other people and still get away with it. We can always walk away, unscathed. It's the same for online guitar lessons. We can still navigate away from a site if it isn't to our liking. If a person tries them out and they don't work (please remember that 70% of the people who come into guitar lessons with me had tried online and then promptly gave up), they won't feel bad for leaving the site. If the lessons were bad, then there's no reason to stay.
The game changes dramatically once a person walks into a guitar lesson, however. They are no longer anonymous and they are now accountable for their actions.
Accountability and Commitment
Many, many people out there may disagree with me on this, but I don't care. Online guitar lessons are completely ineffectual because of one reason: The lack of a professional relationship, a bonding of sorts, between a teacher and student working on something together creates a lack of both accountability and commitment. The teacher is there to help, the student is there to learn, and the professional relationship between the two is what facilitates the process of learning and teaching. There is nothing more. In an ideal teacher/student relationship, both parties feel intensely committed because they both feel accountable for their own actions-both of them affect each other. That's a good reason why I take teaching and learning so seriously. I like people, and I've found that no other excercise out there has made me grow more as a human being than has teaching. I am a life-long learner too. I've often felt that if I had the right reasons to study as well as the right teacher, the one I felt like I could give my heart to, then I could learn what I wanted to learn incredibly fast and well.
The larger the proximity between teacher and student (i.e. emotional distance, as with systemized online guitar lessons, or video conference lessons), the less chance for a professional relationship. The less chance for a professional relationship, the less the commitment. The less the commitment, the less the accountability. The less the accountability (in learning guitar at least), the less chance for fun to happen. In order to learn, we need to be ready to commit, and that's not always an easy thing to do.
I am rather fond of saying, "No one learns in a bubble." It's true. Many students march up to me in their first lesson and tell me that online guitar lessons were a complete waste of time. I won't blame them; There is no interaction with online lessons. Neither is there is any encouragement either. Playing music basically means learning from other people, people who can empathize with you and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. Playing music also means not limiting oneself to learning from one teacher, either.
The people I work with who have the most fun with guitar branch out and find other people to play music with. It's the jamming with others that is exciting about playing guitar. It's even more fun to play with a good drummer and a solid bassist. In six years of intense study, I played with countless musicians. Each one taught me something or at least inspired me to learn even more. Sometimes it was bad, sometimes beautiful, but always instructive. Also, the good news is that you don't have to buy lessons from everyone you play guitar with. Just play and pay attention!
But gingerly and begrudgingly I must also offer that learning guitar also means learning from more than one teacher, especially if the goal is to get a world-view that is incredibly wide. I had six teachers (see the list at the end of the post if you're curious), and each taught me something different, thus expanding my palette exponentially. I must say that as much as I do want to keep being a teacher for any one person, and be a complete teacher from scratch to mastery, it's better ultimately for a person to find many more sources of information. It's all about connecting the dots.
There is a wise saying: You have make some space if you want something new in your life. I think this is true with teaching guitar and getting more clients. If you want more clients, you gotta make some space for them.
Sometimes, in between lessons, I'll sit in my studio without any distractions. I'll lock the door. I'll try to say to myself "Man, I really could be teaching right now." Doing this can have some interesting effects. First, it definitely preps the mind for teaching, and helps to give a bad-ass lesson to someone I like teaching anyways. Second, it's never a bad thing to think that we could be more successful (maybe in my opinion). If it goes well and works, then hey who can argue with progress?
Sometimes the temptation of filling that time with Twitter, blogging, computers, or whatever is too intense, and yeah I'll just dive in. I still recognize that I need my mind to be ready and relaxed. Doing that means emptying the space to make room for something more important, like teaching, being with friends, playing music, and having money to eat food. Food is good for the stomach. I'd rather eat than not eat. Therefore Twitter, you will get second priority.
Making a space and refusing for it to be filled with anything other than what I want (clients for me. What do you want?) tends to re-enforce the idea that I am here to teach too. The less I think about teaching during the day can means the less I find a rhythm. With any luck, I stay far away from the computer, and I just teach. Empty the space of time-wasters, fill the space with students, mentally if not physically. Maybe it's just dumb common sense, but still worth a mention.
"You may find yourself in jobs where you are surrounded by other artists, but the pay is terrible. You may find a decent wage, but you're too exhausted to live your double life as a musician."
By Chris Holm, via http://www.guitarschools.com/. He's right too. It's hard to fight all the time for it. He goes on to explain:
"A well-rounded education can provide you with the ability to play in other styles besides your favorite, allowing you to play out, get stage time, and get your name out there while you're developing what you really love."
I agree. There is nothing wrong with studying other types of music, but being a chameleon is good to a point. I believe that it can be taken to an extreme. Perhaps it's better to to just approach one thing at a time, exhaust it, and then move on? Also, what if you hate to play a certain genre, can play it to a decent level, but do it just to pay the bills? Sounds terrible to me. Music is more sacred than selling it, by doing something that sucks your soul away.
"Musicians who rely only on their natural abilities often find frustration in the many years of waiting for a life-supporting career."
True, if you want a career. If you are doing it just for fun however I can see someone studying slowly and enjoying every bit of the process. If music is near and dear to you and you felt that you were running around in circles, then that would be the time to branch out and study more stuff. Added bonus to that: Amaze your friends! Impress your parents! Build a harem! Just kidding (or am I?).
Dave Wirth
