Difficult student, don’t change
Difficult student, don’t change
The other day, I was teaching a piano student who was struggling to figure out his hand position for his song. I said, “Hold up your left hand.” He held up his right, so I said, “That’s your right hand, buddy.” His mom yelled from the other room, “Do you seriously not know your left from your right?!” After this shaming, he promptly held up the correct hand.
Does he know his right from his left? Absolutely. I could tell prior to this moment that he was “phoning it in”—an absolutely ancient idiomatic expression that I honestly wonder if people even still use anymore. This is a student who often goes into autopilot, bare-minimum mode during lessons when confronted with something challenging or new.
Have you ever been woken up too early, and the person waking you up is asking you questions, like, “Are you awake?” and “Don’t you need to get ready to leave?” At that moment, all you want in the entire world is to keep sleeping, so your brain activates just enough to give whatever answer will make that person go away and stop speaking to you. It’s like that.
I know what’s going on with this kid. New and challenging things make him uncomfortable, so he disengages. Many kids—and adults!—fall back on this strategy. As a teacher, I always want to create a safe environment where there’s no need to fear failure or discomfort and I break up my students’ challenges into manageable pieces and guide them through effective ways of handling those challenges. This kid, though—he is who he is. And to tell the truth, I don’t want to ask him to change!
Maybe it makes progress a little slower. Maybe he’d be playing at a higher level if there were super strict requirements and punishments for deviating from expectations. And he might also hate piano for life if I taught him that way. He recognizes that he feels uncomfortable and he doesn’t like feeling that way. I am not going to convince him to reject his own feelings and desires, and if that impedes his “progress,” then progress be damned. For as long as he takes piano lessons, I’m going to push him as gently as necessary to make room for that discomfort and learn ways to handle it.
Too many of us have been conditioned by strict rules and negative consequences to ignore how we feel and what we want. School, in particular, can teach us to jump through hoops out of fear of punishment, rather than follow any real internal motivation. After a lifetime’s worth of formal schooling, we’ve ignored our own wills for so long that we’ve forgotten how to consult them. Young adults enter the Real World™ not knowing what they want to do with their life, or even with their day, and not knowing where to start to figure it out because they can’t identify their own feelings and needs.
I don’t want to be the kind of teacher who adds fuel to that fire. There is a middle ground between respecting and responding to our emotions and meeting the obligations of the outside world, and I want my students to find it. I want my students to learn a healthy approach to life’s challenges, rather than propelling themselves to meet requirements by relying on coping mechanisms that are ultimately destructive to their emotional well-being. My teaching is focused as much on sustainable approaches to achieving goals as on objective achievements. We’re not just learning music, we’re learning how to learn.
Difficult students, don’t change for me. I hope you grow, for yourself, for your future. But I’m here to teach you as you are.
