Who Is Your Best Student? 4

Who is Your Best Student?

This question can change a child’s life.

Too often we respond by asking “Who has won the most competitions?” Or “Who plays the most difficult music?”

This method is both wrong and damaging.

In truth, sometimes what makes a student his or her best is not what is best for you the teacher. And in fact, all of your students are the best. Sometimes they are best in ways you like, and sometimes they are best in ways that drive you up the wall, but they are all the best at being themselves

But let’s assume we mean by the question “Who is your best piano student?” Even then the answer is not so simple – and certainly not decided by competitions or any single standard.

Right now I’m working with a very gifted, and very young student, who absolutely loves music – he devours it. He reads extremely well and loves to learn new music on his own – often bringing difficult pieces  to lessons that I did not assign him. Above all, he is naturally musical and clearly thinks and approaches music in a very adult “musician like” way.

Now think about this: To win a competition in this age group, many children would be forced to practice the same two minutes of music for several months. And the winner of that competition would be picked – probably somewhat subjectively – based on only this minute or so of playing. The rest of the 6 and  7 year olds, one is assuming, worked in vain.

So what about my student? Well, like many of my kids, he has worked on his competition piece for a few months. But because he is precocious, he has also learned about 10 or so other pieces in the same time period – and explored a ton more.

My point here isn’t that I have a talented student. My point is that I have a talented student who may very well not do well in a competition!

Imagine I had only let this boy work on his one competition piece, at the exclusion of all the other music he has explored. This is a more common approach than you might be aware. And imagine he still didn’t win the competition. What would the result be?

Would he conclude that all of his focused effort was in vain? Would his parents (or he) decide that he might be talented, but not as good as some of the other children? Would he enjoy music as much as he does now, being exposed to twenty times the music as his competition piece, and allowed to feel like music is something fun for him to explore?

I hope you can see that what might be in this student’s long-run interest isn’t always the same thing that would give him good marks in a jury or competition.

The biography of every great success defies common standards. That is why it’s so easy to list successful artists and entrepreneurs who were dropouts, defied convention, and followed their own path.

And yet, probably without realizing it, we are tempted to gauge our students by artificial criteria – not only in music, but in an increasingly wide range of activities. We are grading, judging, comparing our children – not based on their own merits, but on some outside construct.

We think this will lead to success, when what it really leads to is unthinking obedience.

I am not saying there isn’t a right or a wrong way to do things. There are for instance, principles of piano technique that need to be learned in order to play effectively. But this does not mean that a child’s inclinations, strengths, and weaknesses are out the window. Self-discipline is extremely important, but this does not mean fitting any child into a preconceived mold.

In other words, the opposite of “do whatever you feel like and never mature” is not “obey me blindly and shut off your own thinking and desires”.

The tragedy of the standardized approach is that we are forced to fail. We may not realize it for many years . And even if we get the behavior we want, we have lost the larger battle, because we have made it impossible for the child to do the most important thing in life: to discover himself.