teaching from the land of lame

01-19-00

John's still sick. He was ordered to stay home in bed today, so he did, but he called me at work around ten, sullen with flu, to transfer two phone messages. On top of my two calls, there were 3 or 4 more for him. He did not sleep.

One of the calls for me was a "yay!" call—I've scored another student. He's a seventh grade trombonist who needs "more confidence." Those have always been my biggest success stories. His mom wanted to bring him on Fridays, though, and I teach in his town on Wednesdays. A few words with my lone Wednesday student took care of that, and I now have two kids at the church. So my hounding the band director last week worked, after all. I should be a bitch more often.

I'm feeling sort of weird about my current student. (Not that kind of weird, get your mind out of the gutter.) He's a great kid, and has tremendous musical potential. It's another case of meeting a part of my former self in one of my students. He's so busy with school that he doesn't practice. He freely admits that he doesn't practice. But he also wants to go to UGA and major in trombone.

I feel weird because I sometimes don't know what to do with him. He plays well, but there are things that could use improvement. Most of those things would be corrected if he practiced them. I can stress and stress and stress how he needs to breathe, but the only way it will ever improve is if he does it all the time, at home and at school. He doesn't practice the same things over and over. I mean, every week, we come to the same exercises, and he hasn't practiced them. I would ask if he's bored, but these are his all-state audition pieces, so he has to play them anyway. All evidence points to a lack of time/motivation in his practicing.

My normal response is to keep kicking him in the ass until he starts practicing. I just keep opening to the same pages and having him play the same stuff until he can sightread it well enough to go on. I keep telling him the same breathing techniques and practice strategies, and I hope that he will use them so I don't have to discuss "crescendo through the upward passages to make the high notes easier" one more time. I make him tell me! I say, "Great, what would make that A flat easier?" "Crescendo," he says, and I make him play it again.

Every week we go over and over. And over. The same problems, the same answers, and he knows more of the answers every week. But he hasn't thought about them since the last time I asked him.

Do teachers eventually get tired of this? I mean really sick of it. I know most private teachers burn out on students after a few years and go looking for a real job. I'm nowhere near that tired yet. I need more students, not fewer. But I can see it coming: all the kids who think they're the first ones ever to be too busy to practice, the same stories, the same complaints, the same picky competitive fights between section members. They even say the same things about one another, from different schools and different years and different parts of the country.

And, eventually, they'll think I'm old. Right now I fit comfortably into that college kid stage, where high school and junior high kids just think I'm the shit. I'm the confidante, I'm the mentor, I'm the really cool young teacher who says bad words sometimes. But later I'll have wrinkles, and old lady clothes, and I won't have any idea what their music sounds like or what they do for fun. I try to stay on top of the music scene, I really do. I try really hard not to make fun of the Backstreet Boys. If listening to Britney Spears gets kids excited about music, then I really can't complain. (I had a Depeche Mode thing when I was in school, so I really can't complain.) In this area, my kids all love Faith Hill and, oh, countless other country stars whose names I don't know. I don't know. I remember teachers in school who said the dumbest things about popular music, but the worst was when they just didn't know who INXS was. Or Milli Vanilli. Or Temple of the Dog. Those lame teachers. I never want to be on top of the lame pile.