Music Lesson

I spent today with a friend looking around in outlet stores and imagining I had the money to buy everything I wanted. One place we tried was a Daddy's Junky Music shop. My friend and I both like to think of ourselves as musicians, so we looked around and eventually found ourselves in the acoustic guitar section.

My friend plays a very small amount of acoustic guitar, and I play even less. Still, given the opportunity to play a nice guitar, we each picked up the one that looked the most appealing and began strumming.

At one point, we tried to play together. This meant a great deal of time tuning our guitars to each other. My friend began playing a chord progression, which I tried to follow. But he continued to change up the progression as he went. Also, I couldn't quite get the strumming pattern to work. In the end I became more and more frustrated, and eventually put my guitar back and listened to him.

As I think about this experience, I'm struck by the implications I can pull out for my own classroom. I became frustrated trying to keep up with my friend. Although I knew all the chords he was using, and although I understand the basics of strumming patterns, I couldn't keep up with him during our visit. It was still going too fast, and there was still too much involved. The obvious implication on teaching is to remember that even when my students know the individual parts of what to do, putting everything together can be difficult and needs practice. I need to build up to more difficult problems rather than assuming they can simply put everything they know together to solve whatever problem they have in front of them.

The other piece of this scenario is that I was afraid to look foolish in front of my friend. So, rather than try his pattern and risk failing, I would strum once or twice and give up. It's so important to have a context for learning in which the student feels comfortable failing. Courage is easier to attain when the student already feels comfortable.

It surprises me when I find little reminders of what it takes to learn. This situation makes me realize just how important it is for a teacher to continue to learn new information, and especially to try things that are outside of her comfort zone. Without continuing to be a learner, a teacher forgets how difficult learning can be for her students.