I’m Blogging, I Promise ;-)

Setup

I’m not a huge fan of the way the people usually teach music reading. It is commonly learned as a list of notes to memorize when it is really a system with internal logic and can be reasoned from a simple understanding of how it works. One of the ways I like to teach this is by guiding my students through writing music and then trying to play it. This is how I ended up working on some basic music composition in an otherwise normal violin lesson.

The Story

The student in question is one of my more experienced students and certainly one of the most confident. She would still qualify as a “Beginner,” but this does not translate to a lack of confidence. Arguably her confidence exceeds her skill level much of the time. So I was shocked when she suddenly became timid and reluctant in response to this composition exercise.

Like, she initially refused to write a note, so I helped her with, “We are writing in A major, so maybe ‘A’ is a good starting note.” This got us going, but it was struggle to get her to play anything, when I usually have to tell her to stop playing. And then:

“What if it’s bad?”

And the light bulb appears above my head.

“Wait…it doesn’t have to be good, it’s just us. If we don’t like it, we can just throw it away.”

She was so relieved to hear this and we wrote six or seven more notes without issue until her brain got tired, and we decided to move on.

The Realization

So, ultimately, this was a miscommunication, which is obviously mainly on me as the teacher. It was really different from most of what we do, where I am pushing students to be better (and obviously supporting and helping them to achieve it). I think it runs a little deeper than a miscommunication between teacher and student.

“It doesn’t have to be good” isn’t really something teachers say to students very often. Had any teacher ever said this to her before? Did any of my teachers ever say it to me?

Small Tangent

If you talk to or read experts on early-childhood education, they will not shut up about unstructured play. Rightly so, unstructured play is extremely valuable! However, as you grow up, all forms of unstructured play are gradually stripped away in favor of structured activities and shudder “enrichment.”

The Existentialism

It’s so fun and exciting to play with ideas with no expectations. Just make things and experiment and have the freedom to mess up and not worry about it. It seems like we teach that out of people. Certainly it was taught out of me but I’m really trying to re-learn it.

It’s hard not to reflect on what I lost or how my life could be different if my teachers had provided me with opportunities to just play and experiment without the pressure of expectation. I have been paralyzed so frequently by, “What if it’s bad?” or similar. But I cannot change that. What I can change is the future. How can I do more by saying “It doesn’t have to be good” both to myself and to my students?

Conclusion

I’m still a huge fan of working to improve yourself and your skills; it is quite rewarding. But we should all have things where we free ourselves and remind ourselves “It doesn’t have to be good.”