Teaching is solving puzzles. Of course, puzzles are meant to be a bit frustrating; otherwise they wouldn’t be as rewarding when we figure them out. The question is, how do we handle the frustration part?
Thanks to AnaLise for a thought-provoking post last week about this. Her message was essentially that teachers need to be open-minded about learning how to respond constructively to their students, and to avoid resorting to anger, or even (I might add) more covert expressions of frustration. I have to say I took issue with a few of her turns of phrase, though.  For example, if we were to buy into the notion that “high emotion equals low intelligence,” we’d have to figure that Beethoven was some kind of idiot! …In context, of course, she was trying to say that hot-headedness towards a student is not a smart way to get constructive results. (As always, you are invited to join the discussion by adding a comment at the end of this or any post. Thanks for new comments from W.A. on Choosing an Instrument and from Joe on collecting student payments.)
Does there exist a teacher who hasn’t been frustrated at some time? It’s in the nature of teaching, to push people to do things they haven’t done before. There are always going to be students who don’t quite get it, or who don’t try very hard, or who despair, or backslide after achieving progress.
It’s important to note that teachers can also mix into their teaching frustrations that do not stem from their students. Some teachers may feel they are not adequately recognized as performers; others may be teaching too much, for financial reasons, or because they don’t want to turn anyone away. Of course, where these kinds of frustrations are happening, it would be unfair for them to be taken out on students.
I usually find teaching too interesting to be frustrated by it. Each student situation is a solvable puzzle, and I just hope to have enough time to solve it. The pieces of the puzzle include expectations and goals (both the student’s and the teacher’s), coordination, timing, listening, physical positioning, tone, pitch, learning style, teaching style, priorities, and more. All can be balanced and juggled and experimented with, in different sequences and combinations, to make way for progress in learning an instrument.
When I think of students of mine who were most frustrating, they also count as among the most rewarding. Solving their puzzles often involved ratcheting down my expectations to match the amount of care, details, time, and repetition that they needed to be comfortable sorting out what they were trying to do.
Along these lines, the other day I saw a great teaching example (though totally outside of music): My son was reminded by one of his Little League coaches to “cover the base” when the ball was hit. What would happen if the ball was hit, and he didn’t move over to the base? Would the coach get mad that he hadn’t been listened to, or would he take the time to find out that my son actually had no idea what the words “cover the base” meant?
We make this kind of choice every time we teach a student. I’ve noticed that my son’s coaches are good teachers–they don’t get mad; they just try another approach. They read the clues to find out what their students know, discover where the blanks are, and solve the puzzle.
