Since becoming a teacher, I’ve started to reflect more on
the people who taught me at school, and what I can learn from their teaching
techniques. The difficulty is that I’m
not certain I can trust my recollections.
I’ve known for years that certain subjects, including A-Level Maths and
GCSE Sciences, are long gone from my memory, and on thinking about it further I’ve
realised that some of the strongest memories from my school days may in fact be
no more than short excerpts of single lessons.
I may be incorrect in thinking that one particular teacher taught solely
by dictating from the textbook that we all had open in front of us, or that another
had clear favourites and scapegoats in the class. I don’t wish to do an injustice to these
teachers by blogging incomplete and partial recollections about what I think
they did, or failed to do, in class.
So I’ll turn instead to three people who taught me to play
the violin between the ages of 8 and 18.
Let’s call them Anna Locksley, Mrs Trent, and Sarah Donovan.
Anna Locksley –
the beginner’s class
Anna was my first violin teacher, and I worshipped her. Classes took place in a high, airy room, with
upwards of a dozen children, aged between 6 and 10, each clasping a tiny violin
in sweaty hands. Various doting parents sat
around the walls to observe, comparing notes on each other’s little darlings in
a true spirit of competitiveness.
The classes must have involved a lot of repetitive activity,
but I principally remember them being a lot of fun. Anna had a way of telling us important
information with an image or metaphor so we would giggle, and then remember it
forever. For example, if someone was
holding the neck of their fiddle too tightly with their left hand, she’d tell
them to imagine there was a tomato between their hand and the violin – “Don’t
squash the tomato!” Or when we learned how
to bow at the end of a piece, we had to keep our necks straight and look
towards the ground as we leaned, because if you look forward at the audience,
you look like a duck – “No ducks, please!”
More importantly, Anna had the most important skill possible
for a teacher of novice violinists: she never winced, no matter how tortured or
tuneless the scrapings we managed to produce.
Anyone who has suffered the playing of small children will understand
why my sister rechristened my instrument the ‘vile-din.’ Anna was the embodiment of patient
encouragement, leading us through baby steps towards the distant goal of an
Associated Board Grade 1 examination, and (more importantly for some of us),
the audition for the children’s orchestra at the music centre.
Yet the audition was where it all came undone for me. We had all learned the same simple piece to
play, and practised it in lessons and at home past the point of boredom. All we had to do for the audition was line up
outside the lesson room, go in one by one, then play our piece. I don’t remember the wait, nor whether I was
full of nerves, but what I clearly recall is that when it was my turn, I
screwed up.
The examiner (invigilator? auditioner? I’m not sure of the
best word) smiled in a friendly way, then asked me to play my favourite
piece. I froze. My favourite?
That wasn’t the piece I had prepared.
But if that was the one he wanted me to play, then that’s what I’d have
to do. I dutifully played my favourite
piece, which as it happened was far simpler than the intended audition
piece. Afterwards, Anna was shocked and
told me I should have played the audition piece, no matter what the examiner
had said, but I’d been too overawed to do anything other than exactly what he’d
asked. Although I did get into the
children’s orchestra, I’d clearly come across as a weaker player, since I was
put into the second violins, unlike the rest of my class who were in the first
violins. It took a while to recover from
the blow to my confidence.
The relevance of all this to language teaching? It strikes me now that Anna’s classes were
very like a beginner’s language class.
We were learning the building blocks of our instrument, with lots of
drilling and repetitive practice. She
encouraged us to produce music even though what we were so far capable of would
be unrecognisable except to a trained and patient ear. We played together most of the time to build
our confidence, while the teacher monitored us and corrected our
technique. We were given homework in the
form of practice schedules, exercises and scales.
However, my audition problem shows a problem that novice language
learners often encounter when they try to use language in a real situation. This is that they can very quickly become
derailed when a native speaker deviates from the expected ‘script’, and that
this can be both demoralising and embarrassing for the learner, especially if
they feel that their teacher is disappointed in them. The teacher not only needs to prepare
students for what a person may say in a particular situation, and how to
respond to it, but should also be ready to encourage students to view social
errors as learning experiences, and not be discouraged by them.
Mrs Trent – the scary
teacher
I started having individual violin lessons with Mrs Trent
around the time I started attending secondary school. At this time I suffered greatly with shyness,
to the extent that I was often unable to speak to a teacher without bursting
into tears, and consequently I viewed my violin lessons with the utmost
dread. Mrs Trent (very definitely a Mrs –
no first names allowed here!) was undoubtedly a fine violinist, and I believe a
skilled teacher, but for me her brisk directness was utterly terrifying. She had no time for encouragement or humour,
and no patience with my shyness and self-doubt.
When she invited me to join a string chamber group which met
before school once a week, I arrived on time, but had no courage to enter the
room, since all the other members of the group were senior pupils in the
school. When Mrs Trent noticed me
lurking by the door, she barked at me to come in, and scolded me for being
late, meaning that all eyes were on me as I crept in, which of course made
everything worse. For the whole
rehearsal I was too frightened to speak, and stood on tiptoes to read the music
on the stand rather than ask the girl I was sharing with if I could lower it.
Mrs Trent was strict because her standards were high, and
she certainly achieved results with many of her students, but in my case my
fear of her held me back. I began to
associate my violin with the negative emotions that her lessons and rehearsals
inspired, and became reluctant to practise.
The strange thing is that on the one occasion I had a lesson with Mrs
Trent in her home rather than at school, she seemed like a completely different
person. She relaxed more, and even laughed on occasion. In her own home, with her belongings around her,
her professional mask dropped and I enjoyed the lesson far more than any I’d
previously had with her.
The application of Mrs Trent’s teaching style to language
teaching is obvious: students learn less if they’re frightened of the teacher,
or if they feel the teacher’s expectations are too high and they can’t meet them. It isn’t wrong to have high expectations, or to
keep a professional distance from students.
What is wrong is to withhold praise and encouragement when they are
needed, and to fail to take account of students who are nervous, stressed, and
may be experiencing culture shock.
Teachers can’t assume that one approach will work for all students or
classes.
Sarah Donovan –
two steps forward, one step back
The teacher I’m calling Sarah Donovan took over my lessons
after Mrs Trent left, and there couldn’t have been a greater contrast between
them. Sarah was approachable, bubbly and
welcoming, and what’s more she was the same person whether in her school or in
her home. I loved her lessons, and made
a great deal of progress, finally taking the Associated Board Grade 8 exam in
my A-Level year.
Sarah was a great teacher, yet she wasn’t perfect. Particularly during the later years as her
pupil, I’d have liked to have had more autonomy in choosing which pieces I
learned. She could have said “I’d like
to work on these areas of your technique, here are some pieces that would
benefit you; which ones would you like to learn?” I would have liked to listen to violin
repertoire with her and discuss how to interpret particular pieces so that I
could develop a better style. I think
she should have taught me how to take care of my violin: how often should it be
serviced? How often should a bow be
restrung? What is the appropriate amount
of rosin to use on the bow before playing?
You can be an adequate violinist without any of these things,
but you remain dependent on the teacher to make your choices for you: you don’t become your own musician. Similarly, students who rely on spoon-feeding
in the language classroom will rarely make as much progress as those who can adapt
and become independent learners.
Again, I don’t believe my lessons with Sarah included enough
advice or focus on how I should be practising at home if I really wanted to
make progress. Left to my own devices, I
did practise, but had a tendency just to play through the pieces from beginning
to end two or three times, play my scales once, then stop. I didn’t focus on intonation, timing or
technique; I had just one way of practising.
I’ve now taught many language students who do something
similar when they study at home. They
know one way of reading (slowly, with a dictionary for every unfamiliar word),
one way of listening (the TV, with subtitles), and many of them don’t practise
writing at all. If they’re going to
become more effective learners, their teacher needs to suggest a range of
techniques they can try, to help them improve across a range of skills
associated with their language needs.
Finally, there were two occasions in Sarah’s lessons when
something she said had a quite different effect on me than she intended. Both occurred in my final weeks at school,
when the dreaded Grade 8 exam was a recent memory, and A-Levels themselves were
soon to draw to a close. The first thing
she said:
“You’ve got your Grade 8, that’s basically a licence to play
the violin. Now you can do a diploma in
performance, or maybe get a teaching qualification.”
The second:
“You’re left-handed?
Why didn’t you tell me you were left-handed! This will really have affected your
technique. I could have given you some
corrective exercises if I’d known!”
OK, where to start.
Grade 8 was a major milestone for me, the culmination of 10 years of
lessons and practice. Yet no sooner did
I finally have it under my belt, than Sarah (in my view) belittled my
accomplishment and said it was just the beginning. Now this may have been true, but she hadn’t
ever asked me if I wanted to be a professional musician, whether a performer or
a teacher. (I didn’t). Grade 8 was enough for me. And the left-handedness? Sarah had been my teacher for 5 years, during
which time I’d had one-to-one lessons every week during term-time, and also
played in several chamber groups that she’d taught. She’d seen me writing notes on music numerous
times, and also taking my watch off my right wrist every single time before I
played, yet somehow she’d never noticed which hand I write with. And if it made such a big difference to my
playing technique, wouldn’t she have realised it even without seeing me write?
These two things together left me with a bad taste in my
mouth as I came to the end of school, and the end of my lessons with
Sarah. They were a big part of the
reason that I chose not to find a violin teacher at university, or join any
musical groups there, sad to say. I was
all the more disappointed in Sarah because I admired and respected her, both as
a teacher and a friend.
Now, more than a decade later, I can see how easy it is for
a teacher to assume they understand a student’s goals and priorities. I know how it’s possible to miss something
that is holding a student back, and beat yourself up over it later because it
should have been obvious. I’ve made both
mistakes myself, and will probably do so again.
But I’m also aware how a good teacher can have an impact on far more
than your understanding of the subject they teach. So even though neither Sarah nor I lived up
to our expectations of each other, I’m very grateful to her, and Mrs Trent, and
Anna, for what they taught me about teaching.
And that reminds me, I should dig my violin out.
