I received a call this morning from the father of one of my guitar students. His son has just started a new term at school and has elected to take music as an option (a great decision in my opinion).
However, all is not well. In the first lesson he was asked to read some music and answer some basic questions on scales and, having no formal musical training (he currently learns guitar by ear and by rote) he naturally couldn’t.
The next part of the story left me initially incensed, then disappointed and eventually highly optimistic.
According to his dad, the boy arrived home in floods of tears having been belittled by his music teacher (and his classmates) and left to feel embarrassed about his inability to read. Yet, the whole point of being in a music class is to learn what you don’t know and music, as any seasoned professional will tell you, is a life long journey. I interviewed Steve Howe from Yes recently and he shared that his foray into the world of the jazz trio meant that he had to learn a whole new vocabulary of music even though the primary alphabet – the little black dots – remained unchanged.
Now I appreciate there are three sides to every story (yours, theirs and the truth) so I will reserve judgement until our next guitar lesson. After all, our challenges arise with the meaning we choose to give to things and it is definitely the case that my student in this case has chosen his response (even if he does not yet recognise this to be so).
Whenever an uncomfortable event occurs there are generally four things that happen:
1) The truth of the event itself
2) Our own recollection of the event with all it’s distortions, generalisations and deletions
3) The emotion associated with the event that we experience
4) The positive lesson to be taken from that event into the future
The emotions we experience often hide the positive lessons. (With more serious types of physical and emotional trauma, our emotions can cloud these lessons, unnecessarily, for years and years). The impact of our emotions can affect us at both the conscious level (e.g. He now wants to give up music for fear of being made to feel stupid again in class) and at an unconscious level. The impact influences how we think about things and – as a result of that thinking – how we behave and the results we get.
When we go back to the find the positive lessons within a specific event – however uncomfortable that event was – we change the meaning of the event. Once we change the meaning then the challenge (e.g. emotional discomfort) we were experiencing usually disappears and often for good.
How much better would it be for this particular teacher to encourage this student to come to terms with their interpretation of the event; of feeling embarrassed at not knowing how to read music. If you have never been shown how to do something, how can you possibly know? There is no shame in that.
There are a minority of music teachers in every generation throughout the whole of the music education system that seem to enjoy belittling or forcing their students to conform rather than searching for the light within them and encouraging it to shine. Actually thinking about it, this is true of most subjects that are taught.
Tempting as it is, I choose not criticise them because they too, have not been shown either how to deal with their own insecurities and patterns and / or how to encourage each individual student’s light to shine.
Great teachers observe their students and help them find ways to express their own individual essence and artistry (we all have this ability). Great teachers create generative change by helping the student to tap into the resources they already have inside of themselves. My student can read music, he is just not yet aware of that fact yet.
Giving the gift of courage and confidence to express ourselves authentically is why music is such an important subject to teach to youngsters irrespective of whether the student progresses to a career in music or not. You only have to witness the impact of El Sistema programme in Venezuela, Columbia and America to see this.
My hope is that more and more educators learn this so as to help the next generation be more confident and less fearful in expressing themselves in a positive way.
As to our next guitar lesson, I’m really looking forward to that. Not because I want to encourage my student to continue to study music or give up but to help him remember the joy of self expression through playing music and to help him change the meaning of this event for himself and to grow.
2012 continues to leap forwards at pace and I’m happy to announce that I have now received professional accreditation from one of the leading professional associations that regulates practitioners and trainers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
