Why We Teach The Way We Do - By Jaeger Winckler
In an age where musical instruction is becoming more and more industrialized by the public school system, the type of private lesson that we offer here at BMA is becoming simultaneously more important and unique. While the communal public school system creates cogs in a musical machine, capable of technical precision but often unable to play with any sort of joy or understanding, our private lessons create students who are good at music because they love it.
Everything we do at BMA is centered on a three-fold goal: forming happy students, excellent teachers, and delighted parents. How we teach and how our lessons are structured is obviously a really important part of all this, as lessons are the most important place in which our goal can be achieved on a regular week-to-week basis. In this article, I’d like to walk you through why we primarily offer live private lessons, and how the way we teach and your student learns really contributes in a significant way to creating the type of musician we want our students to become. I’ll do this by walking through how the private model of lessons contributes to achieving each of the three outcomes we desire, concluding with a broader overview of the relationship between our mission and our mode of teaching.
HAPPY STUDENTS
“Learn to love what must be done.” This idea encapsulates the type of mindset we desire to instill in all our students. Simply enough, if you hate doing something, you’ll never be good at it. On the other hand, if you truly love what you do and find joy in doing it, you’ll notice significant improvement—if not overnight, then certainly in the weeks and months of consistent practice and putting your love to action. The happy student will love what he does, and thus will necessarily become free, capable, and intelligent, full of joy, gratitude, and confidence (all marks of the truly great musician).
So how do private lessons help us inculcate this type of happiness and love? In short, they allow us as teachers to invest in each and every one of our students, creating genuine relationships that leave students feeling not only valued and cared for, but led in a meaningful and important way. This uniquely personal connection, incredibly difficult to form in a classroom setting, is critical to keeping students happy and interested. Incidentally, it’s also why parental involvement in music education is so important—how will a student be happy if those he has the most connection with aren’t leading the way? Properly approached, the private lesson makes students happy because it leaves them cared for and invested in, with a clear example to follow musically. Ask any great musician who loves what they do why they love music and they’ll nearly universally attribute their love to their childhood teacher who they got to sit down with for 30 minutes each week to learn more about one of the greatest things God has created.
EXCELLENT TEACHERS
Private lessons are also an excellent way of keeping teachers accountable and constantly growing. Under a private model of lessons, it’s impossible to simply reuse and copy-paste a lesson outline every time you sit down to teach. Instead, it’s necessary to know each student and be able to shape a curriculum around each individual needs. While classroom education can certainly be helpful or necessary in some contexts, in a subject like music where each student has different skills as well as needs, private lessons allow teachers to speed up, slow down, skip, or expand the curriculum as necessary, exercising skillful independence by adapting to the needs of each individual student.
It would be nearly unthinkable to train teachers “in batches”—of course BMA trains each teacher individually through an intense months-long process of reading, writing, and mock teaching before sending them out into the musical wild. We think about the student-teacher relationship in the same way. If we’re training students to eventually be musical leaders in their own right, they deserve and need private, individual lessons. In the same way we believe that individual mentoring is necessary to educate excellent teachers, we believe that private lessons are necessary to form excellent (and, of course, happy) students.
DELIGHTED PARENTS
At BMA, music lessons are not just about the teacher-student relationship, but the interactions between parent and teacher as well. BMA parents are fulfilling their musical duties by educating their children in one of the most important callings, and so we believe it is our duty to make them not only satisfied but delighted. Private lessons allow us to delight parents by executing on their specific musical desires and goals for their students. Do you want your child to be a Carnegie-hall performer when he grows up? We’ll make it happen. Do you want your child to be a skilled church musician? We’ll make it happen. Do you simply want to make sure your child understands the fundamentals of music and can hold a tune and sing harmony? We’ll make it happen. Each of these goals requires a significantly different approach to lessons from the teacher and a significantly different level of commitment from students, but because we teach individually, this is all entirely possible.
Practically speaking, private lessons also allow us to efficiently and accurately report on student progress. Many of our teachers teach a studio of 30-40 students, but since each of those lessons happen individually rather than all together as part of a classroom, the teacher can maintain a personal relationship with each of his students, a relationship that allows him to send a helpful and informative report to parents every other month, what we’ve called the “BMA Brief.”
Many families also balance incredibly busy schedules. Private lessons make it easy to work around these schedules; instead of being forced to work a specific class time into an already packed week, parents can work together with their teacher to find the perfect time, whether that’s 7am or 7pm (I’ve taught at both times—fortunately not on the same day). When the headache of scheduling is removed, it allows parents to focus on what truly matters, leading to real delight in what we do—there’s a deep sense of cooperation and working together that’s uniquely afforded by private lessons.
CONCLUSION
In all this, it’s important to remember that while our mode of teaching is individual, our goal is not individualistic. Individual lessons are intended to give students the confidence to emanate their musical happiness in everything they do, whether in their families, churches, or schools. After all, the point of music education is not giving a student the ability to play an impressive Bach fugue in his mom’s basement on his keyboard with headphones in. Rather, music is to be seen as a wonderful gift for the student’s community. Private lessons allow teachers to give their students the tools to make this musical gift a truly high quality experience, something that will make an audience sit up, listen, and genuinely enjoy instead of snoozing off as a six year old plays Ode to Joy for the sixteenth time in a row. The BMA experience is intentionally individual, shaped around each student. At the same time, it is individual because we desire it to become communal in the best way possible upon a student's graduation. We believe that the private lesson leads to happy students, excellent teachers, and delighted parents in a unique way, in a way which ensures that students play not just correctly, but skilfully, with joy and understanding just as the Psalmist commands.
