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I Can’t Teach You Anything

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The School of Athens by Raphael
The School of Athens by Raphael

You know, I really can’t teach you anything.

yours truly

That’s the confession I make to every student I teach sooner or later.

And it’s absolutely true. I might have (some) musical skills, knowledge, even the ability to convey that knowledge – but that’s no guarantee that my student actually learns anything from me at all.

Because the “real” learning happens when the student is alone in his practice room experimenting and trying things out. Hopefully implementing what I’ve shown and taking advantage of the experiences I’ve collected over the years.

Think about it for a moment. You want to learn something. You have the expert in front of you. He has the knowledge – and you don’t. So, you listen and watch and expect that his expertise transfers to you.

It simply won’t.

At least not in the way most people think or hope it does. Because in the end it still boils down to YOU actively doing something with the information. If you don’t act on it, you’ll lose it or never get it in the first place.

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Evernote – How to Track Your Students’ Progress

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When you teach a lot of students, it’s hard to keep an overview of what you’ve already covered. Once in a while I would hand out a “new” song only to hear from my student that we’ve already played it a year ago. The opposite also happened as well. I say something like, “That’s similar to the 2 string octave arpeggio shapes we’ve already discussed” only to get a startled look and the reply that my student doesn’t know what I’m referring to. And rightly so, because I haven’t covered it with him, but with some other student instead.

No big deal, right? Or is it? You get old(er) and bad memory and dementia are inevitable, n’est-ce pas?

Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with bad memory. It’s simply a fact that mix-ups can and do happen when you teach more than a handful of students.

Part of the problem is that when at the end of a lesson you picture doing something with a student in the future, that vivid image might get stored similarly to an actual past experience in your mind. So you might think that you already covered something while actually you just recall an imagined future lesson.

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