Having recently taken my Grade 8 saxophone exam, I have been led to ponder the extent to which we define ourselves by our shortcomings.
I have written in a previous column about my reasons for putting myself in for a Grade 8 exam that you could rightly say is unnecessary. I don't need UCAS points, and I'm not aiming for an alternative career as a sax player. It was simply a way to make myself practise. I play in a covers band and quite fancied adding ‘Baker Street’ to our playlist. That's it really – turning air sax into real sax. Simply resolving to practise was never going to cut it: sax practice was never going to make it to the top of my to-do list. Entering myself for a slightly unfeasible exam was my way of forcing the issue.
Putting myself well and truly into a learner's shoes again has brought a lot of thoughts to the fore: the way it feels when your technique is insecure enough to require a following wind in order to play a difficult passage accurately; feeling like your brain and fingers have had a row and are no longer talking; and wondering if one of the springs on your keywork has popped out – or is it the way you're playing it? Will I ever be able to play that fiendish study properly? Maybe this exam was a bad idea…
When exam day came, it was necessary to quell my internal dialogue by telling it that worrying would only make it more likely that things would go wrong. I was feeling reasonably confident about most of my pieces, and had had a very enjoyable run through with my accompanist, but I knew that the study was still distinctly dodgy. Best to stay calm and style the whole thing out with as much aplomb as I could muster.
In the event, and perhaps predictably, it was a case of good in parts – excellent in some, but so bad in others that I can only hope it gave the examiner some entertainment. The study – a lung-busting special entitled ‘See-Saw’ – was an absolute train crash. Apart from being right on the edge of what my emerging saxophone technique could cope with, this was, to a great extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew that this was the piece that was going to go wrong.
It occurred to me that this happens a lot with our students – whatever you teach and whoever your students are. What they achieve is mostly what they expect to achieve. I can think of an A-level student who shows visible signs of distress as soon as I ask her to identify a cadence. If a pupil has a perception that they can't do something, it is not often that they surprise themselves by suddenly being able to do it. This is where the teacher really comes into their own.
Teachers need to know a lot of stuff, and be able to explain it well. We also need to be able to control our classes and be organised enough to cope with all the administrative requirements of our jobs. But finding ways to convince our pupils that they can do things they never thought they could – that is where the real alchemy comes in.
It takes a while to work out exactly what is going on. Just finding out which things they don't think they can do is a job in itself, especially when you teach large numbers of students. After that, figuring out why they feel that way can require a great deal of detective work. Then you need to find ways to change their mind, while simultaneously planning activities to keep them in that zone of making little steps of progress as often as possible. Sound like an impossible task?
Well, it definitely would be impossible to do with 100% reliability all of the time. That we are able to do it at least some of the time is what keeps the wheels of learning turning, and provides some of the best ‘I love my job’ moments. It matters that in music teaching, we get to know our students very well, because we often help them through times when they are feeling scared about performing. This makes them more likely to open up about their reasons for believing they can't do things.
My conclusion is that I need to devote more of my time and effort into zooming in on those areas where a change in students’ own perceptions is going to make the greatest difference to their learning. I need to ask ‘What it is that is stopping you?’ more often. It is a crusade to banish the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
Footnote: in case you're wondering, I got a merit in my exam. I also played ‘Baker Street’ in a gig last weekend, without my sax saying no to any of the top Ds.
