How to Teach Music Theory

Some of us are simply fortunate. We have worked with the best in the music teaching profession and performed with genius live on stage. Fortune however, is a trickster. It exposes one to the queerest, naughtiest or even weirdest of round pegs in square holes. Yet, there abound opportunities throughout life by which we ourselves – those of us who truly want to help learners – may learn. Rather than pass on knowledge for knowledge’s sake, we may transfer worthwhile experience gleaned from understanding and the rare practice through which a superior skillset is acquired. That is the only pathway to the art of music theory education – the strangest subject for most twenty-first century learners.

Practice is the first step in this pathway. No one needs a survey to understand that children who play an instrument find theory of music easier to understand. It’s not the other way round. Ample evidence from music history suggests that practice came before theory. The musicologist came around only to explain what has been performed or, if he strikes gold, who performed it. Therefore, if you want students to understand clefs, lines, spaces and the dots and strokes which mean something to you, rule of the thumb is, let them play!

Rhythm is the place to start once learners have begun to play. You are not responsible for their numeracy experience in early life but you’re headed for trouble if your student can’t count. So, this is the place where your efforts, patience and empathy matters. For what it’s worth, use the right term to mean the right concept. Say how long in beats and in actual value. And yes, you’d have to begin with whichever works better for the grade your student is in. The index here is, please let them count.

Pitch may only be understood from a printed page of sheet music if the faculty of mental hearing is developed. Your duty as a music teacher is to facilitate this. Start from scratch using which clef is appropriate, given the instrument your student plays. Needless to say that A in music ought not be said like reading the letters of the alphabet. Never rob it of its sound. Music teachers need to get used to this. A, B, C, etc. are living sounds and should be communicated as such. Therefore, if you want students to understand pitch in a theory class, middle finger rule is, let them hear.

Ring finger rule is next and simple enough: let them write. Scribbles done in bits and in your presence are worth more than individual efforts at unsupervised assignments. Ring the coil of the treble clef and stop right there. Let them scribble. Loop the top on line four and stop there. Let them roll. Dot a note head in a space and please, Madam Music Teacher, stop. Let them do the same right after you. It’s the only way – oh! a step on the pathway.

As obvious as a show of the target as an aid to learning may seem, too many teachers take it for granted. Dear friend, if you intend teaching them to write a phrase, it’s just fair to show the phrase first, and then to teach the writing process poco a poco. The rule here is, show the standard. Let them see what has been written – maybe handwritten – then show them how to handwrite the same. This is quite applicable to teaching transposition, for example.

The secret of becoming the teacher you wished you had – avoiding the teacher who discouraged the prodigy in you – is hidden herein: Let them play. Let them count. Let them hear. Let them scribble. And let them see the standard for what it is.

Learner Driven Lessons

CURTAIN

Think of your classroom as a theatre. If the first scene is boring, the audience is forever lost! An opera’s overture is therefore brilliantly conducted for the effect of buying over the audience. A teacher must make her lesson as irresistibly captivating an experience for the varied learners who ‘buy tickets’ for a good time as the conductor seeks to achieve for his audience.

Perceiving the teacher as the conductor of an opera, or as the director of a musical, would help focus our lenses on the learner. When we don’t, we tend to see through a veil, just like sheet music poses as a screen between the performers and the conductor. Performers want to play as is written. The conductor wants to interpret the written music as was intended by its composer. Then he does a little else besides, spinning the entire performance out of the lifelessness of impassive printed pieces of music.

Keep in mind that he doesn’t play anything. That doesn’t mean he can’t. His job is to put an ideal in the minds of performers and trust them to bring it about. Thus he takes their presumptions away. The illusions, or the principles they have learnt to live with, go out the window but their skills remain. Their collective abilities are therefore harnessed to convey that maestros objectives before a live audience.

Similarly, what twenty-first century teachers want to do is reverse the familiar position where the teacher functioned as a violinist or trumpeter. Today’s treasured teachers guide and prompt learners to drive the very lessons that brought them to school.

1.    CONDUCTORS

The Teacher as an Opera Conductor

Conductors – from Sir Colin Davis to Sir Georg Solti – have done, and continue to do, more tremendous work than they get credit for. Art critics and theatre goers don’t always see how these maestros convert age-old creativities scripted by legends of the score to such aural energy which delights a packed Royal Opera House. Teachers may learn a thing or two from the knowledge, skill and understanding that goes into conducting before a live audience.

Conductors interpret the score. They set the tempo (speed) at which the music is performed. They ensure that each instrument or section enter at the right time because the orchestra is usually large and performers don’t all sit in one spot but are spread across the stage or pit. Conductors make a crucial note of how each phrase is expressed to give the appropriate impression in the scrutinizing ears of an informed audience. They use a baton or their hands to gesture signs formed from verbal their equivalence in several rehearsals. They know their musicians’ expertise just as well as they know the music being performed and its composer. No, they don’t play a note. Yes, they make sheet music from the grave quiet of libraries come alive to the delight of concert goers who buy tickets for a good time.

Teachers ought to be just like conductors. Teachers should pull the very strings which make their students learn. Teacher should prompt rather than push, aid rather than goad, make learning occur rather ram contents in. The teacher may operate like the conductor of the opera.

2. ILLUSIONS

The boring teacher worries about content. The smart teacher stops to think of what might earn her the students’ attention. Getting your students’ attention is no less important than getting to your subject matter. Only teachers who get this right ease-out of the rot that places teaching above learning – a global illusion! Schools which develop students from neck up gain too little.  The time has come for a test-drive with students in the driver’s seat. Elected citizens are not likely to govern better than the nation’s education can afford.

Primary Illusion – the Purpose Principle

It shouldn’t be so easy to forget what informed the educational system we evolved. Challenges posed by the evolving economies of England, Wales, Germany, France and the rest of Western Europe needed to be met. This object of functionality necessitated the school system we developed, especially in nineteen century Britain. No one needs a study revealing a third of sex workers being graduates to understand that major education issues exist in British society. But why educational policy makers and school administrators fail to re-evaluate their systems in favour of functionality should worry twenty-first century teachers. Think of this as the purpose principle, our primary illusion, the thought that children go to school because the government says so.

Secondary Illusion – the Pompous Principle

We can’t afford to continue with all our attention on the teaching and the teacher much more than we focus our primary target, the learners. If we continue to reverse priorities we permanently engage a secondary illusion – the pompous principle. No, it isn’t all about us. Didn't Galileo say it all? "You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself." If my focus is me, I’m the same old teacher, a global illusion chief.

Tertiary Illusion – the Process Principle

We recently reviewed our music curriculum to further reflect international mindedness, practice and a better understanding of the basics of creativity.  Perhaps I should state that to achieve this new approach we had to go through too many bottlenecks. Why? We have processes! This is the process principle – our tertiary illusion. We have such process in place as if to ensure that students don’t learn, bureaucracy and all.

Quaternary Illusion – the Promoter Principle

They learn like a sponge on a wet table mops up the liquid. Thus must a teacher determine what students need retain for a short while different from what they need to hold on to for a long, long time to come. If he doesn’t, he practices the promoter principle – our quaternary illusion. Too long stories, too lengthy notes, too complex explanations, too many demonstrations, yet the salesman sells nothing.

Quinary Illusion – the Pointless Principle

You probably know nations in which engineers have been raised but whose governments contract foreign construction firms for infrastructural projects. This is the pointless principle – our quinary illusion – that doesn’t make me want to go to school.

3. REVERSAL

Today’s treasured teachers make learning happen by making conscious efforts to assume mastery of its styles and strategies. Putting students in charge of their own learning comes with practice as it does in the experience of the conductor of the orchestra. Teachers who share best practices affirm that a thorough mix of theory and practice brings learning about especially if the former is not favoured over the latter.

Learner-Driven Approach

To achieve learning the learner’s way, teachers adopt one or more methods of teaching. The key is to split the time in two so that one part favours preliminaries as well as the shortest concept introduction possible whereas the other part centers around activities. Both lesson plan and lesson delivery ought to be structured in this way.

·  Preliminaries and briefest concept intros – 30 min

·  Activity-centered delivery – 30 min

Another approach is to split the period in three as highlighted below:

·  Preliminaries and briefest concept intros – 15 min

·  Activity-centered delivery – 15 min [advance]

·  Management, corrections – 15 min [redress]

Learner-Driven Options

There are many options available online in use by many teachers already. Whatever helps give the learning process to students may be created by a teacher so long as lessons objectives are achieved and the strategy is not at variance with school policy. A few of them are suggested below:

Student-Centered Instructions

Ø     Discussion

Ø     Presentation

Ø     Experiment/Workshop

Ø     Project

Ø     Debate

Instructional Strategies

§ Practice

§ Reciprocal teaching

§ Comparison matrix

§ Learning feedback

Learner-Driven Assessments

Once students have been put in charge of their own learning, it is only fair to assess them with that strategy in mind. For instance, multiple choice questions, fill-in the blank spaces and essay type questions may be categorized as theoretical while projects, experiments and performances are practical. Assessment should therefore reflect these in appropriate proportions.

A Sandwich strategy may put practical work in between essay and objectives – 50/50 standard

1.      Written [theory] – 30 min

2.    Practice [activity] – 60 min

3.    Written [objectives] – 30 min

An ice cream strategy may simply adopt one theoretical instrument and another practical one.

a.     Written [theory] – 30 min

b.    Practice [activity] – 30 min

RECAPITULATION

Like opera conductors, working past the score, or avoiding illusions which translate into faulty teaching principles, is what teachers need to do. Once done, we reverse these principles by harnessing those styles & strategies which help learners drive their own lessons.

CONDUCTORS interpret the written music, set the speed of the performance, ensure musicians enter when they should and shape how each phrase is expressed. They do all that without playing a note during the performance, yet the audience enjoy an awesome experience.

ILLUSIONS in the teaching profession, apart from those plaguing society and government, have blur how learners are perceived. They eventually have constituted themselves as fault lines capable of wrecking the very essence of education. By reason of calling however, teachers have a unique opportunity to rectify these fault lines.

REVERSAL, that is all teachers have to do now. Teachers would do well to focus on learning sequence, styles and strategies when planning and delivering lessons. Teachers may then approach this noble profession and adopt suiting options which ensure that learners drive their own lessons.

Reversing Teacher-Driven Lessons

Lessons ought to be driven by learners. Since most of the plans and delivery style teachers adopt are teacher-centered, it is imperative to reverse our strategies. Reversing our strategies begins with a learner-driven consciousness. This means the mind of the teacher must be brooding over how the learner learns what she teaches.

The step-wise process taken to achieve learning is the learning sequence. There are learning styles which learners themselves employ by preference. These are apart from learning strategies which are consciously put to work by learners. When teachers work with these in mind, they put learners in charge of their own learning, conducting the process with the instrumentality of the styles and strategies of the learners.

LEARNER-DRIVEN LESSONS

Learner-Driven Approach

To achieve learning the learner’s way, teachers adopt one or more methods of teaching. The key is to split the time in two so that one part favours preliminaries as well as the shortest concept introduction possible, whereas the other part centers around activities. Both lesson plan and lesson delivery ought to be structured in this way.

·  Preliminaries and briefest concept intros – 30 min

·  Activity-centered delivery – 30 min

Another approach is to split the period in three as highlighted below:

·  Preliminaries and briefest concept intros – 15 min

·  Activity-centered delivery – 15 min [advance]

·  Management, corrections – 15 min [redress]

Learner-Driven Options

There are many options available online in use by many teachers already. Whatever helps give the learning process to students may be created by a teacher so long as lessons objectives are achieved and the strategy is not at variance with school policy. A few of them are suggested below:

Student-Centered Instructions

Ø     Discussion

Ø     Presentation

Ø     Experiment/Workshop

Ø     Project

Ø     Debate

Instructional Strategies

§ Practice

§ Reciprocal teaching

§ Comparison matrix

§ Learning feedback

LEARNER-DRIVEN ASSESSMENTS

Once students have been put in charge of their own learning, it is only fair to assess them with that strategy in mind. For instance, multiple choice questions, fill-in the blank spaces and essay type questions may be categorized as theoretical while projects, experiments and performances are practical. Assessment should therefore reflect these in appropriate proportions.

A Sandwich strategy may put practical work in between essay and objectives – 50/50 standard

1.      Written [theory] – 30 min

2.    Practice [activity] – 60 min

3.    Written [objectives] – 30 min

An ice cream strategy may simply adopt one theoretical instrument and another practical one.

a.     Written [theory] – 30 min

b.    Practice [activity] – 30 min

Fixing Teaching Illusions

Fixing the Purpose Principle

From teaching children to draw straight lines in numeracy classes to insisting on specific fingers in music lessons, we all have championed principles around which our profession has been built with neither any consideration for the uniqueness of learners nor any thought for their individual preferences. What if I want to draw curves? What if the idea of not pleasing my teacher terrifies me? What if I prefer to have my right hand up on the saxophone? Why doesn’t anyone tell instrument makers to make saxophones the other way? If everyone thought the same way about the same things there would be no inventors on the planet.

We evolved ‘standard’ expectations which have held too many children back for too long. We think this or that is why they are in school. We leave little room, or none at all, for expecting them to be themselves. Sport coaches have had to bench students who got low grades in math. Worse, we sold these ideas to parents. At a time the best singer in school got denied performances because her dad felt awful with her grades in an examination which has no bearing on the girl’s preference – music. Good to mention that some parents didn’t buy into it. I once had a mother who pulled her daughter out of the laboratory to my music room afternoon after afternoon.

Understand, students are humans, albeit young. They came to this planet on purpose. That one reason should drive our school system. The day – or semester – we begin to care less about language grades when a student is soaring in physics, is the day school gets worth their while. Let them be! Let them take the lessons knowing they don’t have to fit our stereotypes. We have gained too little developing children from neck up. This principle of erroneous perception of learners’ purpose is a societal fault line needing an immediate fix.

Fixing the Pompous Principle

At a jazz masterclass I asked a Berklee professor what was paramount on his mind whenever he taught his students. Permit me to paraphrase his answer here: “I know they have come to learn, but I also know I could learn from them.” A professor of music, I had thought, shouldn’t have anything to learn in that field from anybody for that matter, let alone a student of music. Well, I was wrong. He learns a great deal from them. In contrary, I hear about a teacher shutting up a child who finished a sentence for her. Why teachers feel like horses drawing chariots will never be clear to twenty-first century learners.

The time has come for a test drive with students in the driver’s seat. We shouldn’t be afraid to arrive at a place where our lesson plan is no longer necessary especially if it can’t be adjusted in the learner’s favour. Moreover, we should stop marking them wrong. Simply schedule a discourse over what the lesson was about allowing them to share how they conceived it. Then would we realize how wrongly we have been teaching and grasp how best to communicate in such ways as they might be able to learn. The way doctors think they are greater than their patients (until they get down with something) is the same way teachers think they know more and can do better than their students, until they find the words of Will Rogers to be true: “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” Whether or not it evolved from the school administrator’s perception of herself as higher than the janitor, we need to correct this professional fault line of superfluous status now and always.

Fixing the Process Principle

If you don’t like meetings don’t become head of anything. In the world we now live in there are many of them lacking objectivity. Then you have to do a round of the stores, window-shopping. You would follow that up with drawing papers to back-up your proforma invoice. What you have to do next is another meeting with your supervisor to defend the papers you filed. There’s one more meeting after that. It’s holds with the school administrator and, if you don’t sound convincing enough – even if your students badly need the item you requested – you’d need yet another meeting with the purchasing manager. Beyond this point you have to hope the accounts director doesn’t think it’s too expensive. And on it goes until you start wondering if you were hired to teach or meet.

Creativity is lost in the maze of too many steps. Once the path is cluttered the person is confused. The surest way to sicken a system is to hire straight-jacket bureaucrats in the name of processes. An indication of this may be found in meetings and procedures devoid of empirical substance. When there is only one way to do right there is one certain result – death, from boredom and/or disorientation. Nothing matches flexibility when it comes to running a community of learners for passion is certain to wane should you have to sign papers in four offices to get anything done. They were supposed to help keep a structure in place but they do little else than ensure it crumbles on its own head; or worse, crack open to swallow everything serving it. And so must we overcome this administrative fault line or run the risk of demotivating our work force.

Fixing the Promoter Principle

Discussing the fault lines in our education systems would be an incomplete attempt if we don’t zero-in on the classroom experience. Students sit in class for endless minutes listening to an ‘expert’ rant about the wildest topic from the strangest subject. It was one head of school who made me realize how strange the treble clef seems to dyslexics. I had always thought it a very beautiful curve around five lines and the spaces in between so long as you ensure it runs around the second line. Now, what in the world have I just described and why should it run clock-wise around the second?

Seeing that all students can’t learn this way, I chose ever since to trivialize and simplify that pitch symbol. To make it seem less of a big deal, I suggest its function and make them play with it; to make it easier to draw, I show rather than tell while engaging them with the actual pencil work. This is what the science teacher ought to do rather than talk and give lengthy notes to eleven-year-olds on separation techniques. Mix grains of sand with a pinch or two of salt (sodium chloride) and share how this mixture could be separated. Then leave them to do it. We would need fewer preps if we spread out contact periods for real-time learning experiences than hoping they can ram it in their heads from notes and textbooks. This productivity fault line can be mended.

Fixing the Pointless Principle

There are more written assessment instruments in the world’s educational institutions than there are skill-based assessment structures. What is the appropriate measure of competence in vocational subjects – performance and creativity or explanation in writing? Americans began to worry when jobs went to Chinese firms no less than Africans express frustration when projects go to German companies. How did we evolve a society in which government contracts are won by foreign construction firms unchallenged by its people who are not any less trained or skilled?

Government is constantly under pressure to create more jobs at a time when schools are attempting to incorporate more vocational subjects into the curriculum. Which should we clamour for – jobs in corporations or entrepreneurial vocations – if we were certain that either would function at their very best? One reads in the dailies sickening reports of ailing African leaders who spend billions of dollars on foreign medical treatments, the kind of funds more than sufficient to fix their country’s health systems. Why should we raise professors of medicine who can’t/don’t treat their country’s ailing government officials because foreign medical trips are alluring tours?

Although fixing fault lines in governance, key to a better communal experience, is the responsibility of public office holders, it must begin in school. No government will operate better than its nation’s education system. No people will emerge a leader better than its finest constituent fabric.

Teaching - a Global Illusion

A colleague at one job-alike session shared how he walked into a classroom with a talking drum hanging down his shoulder for a lesson on rhythms. All his pupils were instantly hooked! Another music teacher would have rapped on in monotone – yes, rhythm is written in monotone, I know – the definition of rhythm and gone on to scratch a few sketches as illustration. You’re right: the children would have fallen asleep.

Understand, the boring teacher worries about content. (I agree, content is key.) The smart teacher stops to think of what might earn her the students’ attention. This is by far more important than your subject matter. Why? You may bag a Ph.D. in a strange subject. It means absolutely nothing to learners if you don’t get their attention first. If you do, ease into your subject. Only then would you ease-out of the rot that places teaching above learning – a global illusion!

Education in most of Africa still places superfluous emphasis on literacy and numeracy. This means society’s outcry over unemployable graduates may never fall on the ears of the continent’s governments. One needs not refer to under-funding and social vices which also plague our Asian counterparts. Recent news from out of India about how families and educators ‘enhance’ students’ performance is quite unpleasant, to put it mildly. Although erroneous instructional strategies ought to share in the blame, those of us in the vocation which clamours for memorization have forgotten that the industrial revolution informed our current school system. We see what we don't want to see and hope it can fix itself; what we see stares us in the face, yet we seem helpless to fix our mess.

Much coveted American education has been relegated into the background by a superior Finnish model. Breeding over-population in the midst of racial divide, plus stagnant funding and dwindling teacher innovation, inevitably result in such national retrogression of school systems. Political correctness does not wreck society leaving education behind. An x-ray beam on America, Nigeria and Britain would reveal that much even if it’s difficult to remember how it all began.

No, it shouldn’t be so easy to forget where, or why, we got here. The challenges posed by the evolving economies of England, Wales, Germany, France and the rest of Western Europe needed to be met. This object of functionality informed the school system which evolved, especially in nineteen century Britain. No one needs a study revealing a third of sex workers being graduates to understand that major education issues exist in British society. But why educational policy makers and school administrators fail to re-evaluate their systems in favour of functionality should worry twenty-first century teachers. Think of this as the purpose principle, our primary illusion, the thought that children go to school because the government says so.

Simply put, we shouldn’t be called teachers. We are learning aid givers whose students have come to learn so they may apply themselves to their world and leave it a better place for those behind. It is not so much what is taught as whether or not the transmission occurs. Did learners learn? We can’t afford to continue with all our attention on the teaching and the teacher much more than we focus our primary target, the learners. If we continue to reverse priorities we permanently engage a secondary illusion – the pompous principle. No, it isn’t all about us. Didn't Galileo say it all? "You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself."

Suppose I told you that I taught calculus to four-year-olds. Without thinking for a second, you would naturally question the possibility. But that’s exactly what many teachers do, in principle of course. We attempt to share complex unfamiliar content with young people who have no business whatsoever learning them. What if I told you that my puberty lesson with fourteen-year-olds was more interesting than my previous ‘experience’ with the four year old calculus class? Ah! You see. The fourteen year olds could relate to facial hair and round muscles whereas the four year olds could not make sense of my abstract further mathematics. The older youngsters could perceive my subject. In the case of the younger children, I had a round peg in a square hole. They needed to know certain things first before this would make sense to them. So, if the person for whom my subject is intended is unable to relate to its contents I don’t stand a chance. In other words, if my focus is me, I’m the same old teacher, a global illusion chief.

When I was a younger teacher, I could teach the major scale by sharing the number of notes needed, where the semitones occur and how these notes rise or fall, all in writing. Trust me, this is the worst way to teach that topic! Now, I simply slot-in a practice schedule. It never fails! When students play – if students play, how students play – learning occurs. I worry more now over if they learn than what I teach. They feel the key holes on their clarinets, hear the sound from their violins. As such they need not any teacher telling them the notes rise or fall. They literally see the semitones between E and F and can relate to B and C on the piano. They see the how in the what. The knowledge communicated in such a lesson will never be lost. They have indeed acquired a skill.

Perhaps I should state that to achieve this new approach we had to alter the curriculum. I’m ashamed to say I had to put up a good fight to get it approved. Why? We have processes! This is the process principle – our tertiary illusion. We have such process in place as if to ensure that students don’t learn, bureaucracy and all. We don’t want anything new, or we just want to kick the can down the aisle. Perhaps it would make sense next term, next session, next five years. Yes, we should check our processes and review them. The way we teach next academic year ought to be different from the way we taught in the last. (We are still teachers, rather than facilitators of learning. Wrong.) We prefer to teach. They prefer to learn.

They learn like a sponge on a wet table mops up the liquid. Assume the table to which I refer is the work desk of a visual arts teacher. When that lesson is over, he may succeed at squeezing out the water into a sink. Well, not the paint. It hangs in there. If it’s water-soluble, it may rinse off under a running tap. Otherwise, the precious sponge just got more precious with new colour. Thus must a teacher determine what students need retain for a short while different from what they need to hold on to for a long, long time to come. If he doesn’t, he practices the promoter principle – our quaternary illusion. Too long stories, too lengthy notes, too complex explanations, too many demonstrations, yet the salesman sells nothing.

All of our teaching efforts need to engage the transfer mode where students are able to use skills previously learned in other tasks. In twenty four years I have seen pupils who can define adverbs but are unable to pick them out of a sentence, let alone construct their own sentences with adverbs in them. You probably know nations in which engineers have been raised but whose governments contract foreign construction firms for infrastructural projects. This is the pointless principle – our quinary illusion – that doesn’t make me want to go to school.

It should not be mistaken for the purpose principle. The principle of pointlessness is what makes us study the subject we can’t apply, whereas the former helps us lose sight of the need to study in the first place. I love the part of Chinese education policy which emphasizes vocation, crushing pointlessness. We are not teachers because we teach, we are teachers because we help others learn, in which case we ourselves have learnt how to learn and can use that skill for the benefit of others. If we can get the attention of students who can perceive our content enough to internalize skills, retaining the most relevant pieces of information that makes the learner able to use it in other climes, we have made learning possible. But we can do more than that.

        We can create a curriculum that sees beyond today, realizing that we came to help learners learn, working through the steps involved in what we do as well as those for editing what we do and how we do it. We can evolve a system that does not clutter the path of learners with stuff they don’t need but offers what they might apply should situation changes. When we do, we would have challenged our faulty principles and moved beyond the worldwide illusion tagged teaching. We are not teachers, remember? We are aid workers in learning fields.

The Pianist's Parkinson's

He begins at the place others quit: rudiments. From then on to fingering and preparatory exercises up till his delight at his own first tunes, he pores through page after page of five lines and the spaces in between. The moment he begins mastering his favourite key of C, he has G to face and F to conquer or be vanquished by A flat. He runs at the scales to visit with masters before his age such that from his first day before a synthesizer to his first night at the concert grand, he has seen several years of assiduous rehearsals daily, knowing that a day missed is made up for by another or two. With time he reels out the notes of his first performance piece.

Oh the monster-saint of performance! Should he show up as a demon, the child pianist is cast out of the concert hall to seek some other career. Should he grace it as an angel of the spotlight with the blessings of Beethoven and Chopin, unto us is a child of wonder born, and the grease shall be upon his knuckles that the feet of all la belle monde beat a path to the repertoire of yet another prodigy of awesomeness at the 88 keys. Performance is the place where he begins, the place where he peaks, the place where he flickers. Thus he approaches each piece as though it were a performance, always seeking to make the appropriate impression, whether it be in the privacy of his home studio or in the grave quiet of a packed Carnegie Hall. Whichever way it is: the pianist makes the performance or the performance makes the pianist, no one can tell them apart for nothing matters more than the ebonies, the ivories and the phalanges that make them sing.

Be he self-trained, gone through a school of music, exercised under a tutor or submitted to a mentors challenge in a church choir, this one man has endured a soldier’s regimen without a lash or a bullet wound. Yet there had been lashes of agoraphobia and the internal scars that curse the knuckles with pain, both from which he has been delivered. But never does he recover from the moment of hesitation before each first bar, the smoothness of a flawed scale flow, the sensitivity of replicated touch or the rigours of precision dexterity featured only in privacy. These constitute the pianist’s Parkinson’s―a caution to his soul, a quaking for his body.

So, with hundreds of tunes played, volumes of hymns read, scores of maestro classicals fingered and dozens of delicate jazz chords jammed, he arrives at a point where he seems to have seen it all. Nothing is sufficiently challenging anymore than the perfectionism of a sniper. The great eagle begins to clip worn quills pouring out his own masterpieces of improvisations for the next generations of pilgrims seeking conquests of mythical and mystical legends of the score.

Learning Styles

I once invigilated a Basic Seven physics examination in which candidates expressed frustration about what separation technique worked for which mixture. Out of sympathy I asked how they were taught. I’ll paraphrase their response – to my shock – “He (the teacher) explained it all to us. Then he gave us a note.”

While that may serve some students well, it certainly wouldn’t count for knowledge with the rest. Reason? Students learn in different ways. Whatever happened to little old experiments?

Learning styles are the different methods of processing new information. This means that different people take in, understand, express and remember information in different ways.

There are four predominant learning styles: visual, auditory, textual (read-write) and kinesthetic.

Visual learners learn best through what they see. A teacher should therefore use pictures, diagrams or charts to reach them in class, otherwise he will lose them. Using a symbol to represent a section of the note, or to drive home a point, help them more than anything else. The colours in your note will also help this group. A video clip, a sketch of cartoon or whatever else can spark up an image of the new information in their head will not be lost on visual learners.

Auditory learners need to hear you speak. The teacher’s explanation must be clear and concise. They don’t care so much what your diagram is saying so long as you say it clearly in a well-articulated speech. Where words fail the teacher, she can employ a song and be certain to have effectively communicated to this group of learners. An audio works perfectly with them. They are excellent listeners. They would rather read out loud to themselves or to the whole class than read with sealed lips.

Read-write learners may be better referred to as textual learners. Give them a note and they will be fine. Tell them to write down the idea in their own words and you are home and dry. Your job gets very well done when you give them an ebook to work with. The dictionary is their friend. They love glossaries. Give them the assignment to re-arrange a list and they will think you’re the best teacher in the world.

Kinesthetic learners love to do things. If the teacher can plan hands-on experience into her lessons, they’ll be jolly well ahead of the pack. It makes sense to include an activity or two into each lesson. Let them use their hands, eyes, legs, etc. Practical work and projects help these learners. They’ll stay awake if there is something to do – walk, hop, skip, jump, ride, climb or run. So, the teacher can take the entire class out of the room into the school field for a science lesson, get them to plant the bean instead of draw it. (The latter would serve visual learners better.) Otherwise, the lesson – every lesson, or even school life – is boring! This is why it’s so important to have sports in school or an entire category of learners are left out of the school experience.