I’ve been down about my teaching lately. My students have been struggling. I myself, on the other hand, have never sounded better. I’ve been playing major repertoire every weekend for many months straight, with no end in sight, and I have generally been able to keep up with the demands of that schedule. How can that be? We all know the archetype idea of a teacher who is a better teacher than player, and vice versa. For many, many years, I rejected that idea— not that I think every great player is also a great teacher for anyone, but that a great teacher really needed to also be very proficient at the trumpet. Perhaps not the most proficient, but very.
But here’s the problem I’m running into: the way I have become Pretty Good(TM) is, well, boring. I tell my students often that if they could watch me practice, they would be bored. It is slow. So slow. And so, so repetitive. Meditative, bordering on catatonic. And that does not make for good teaching.
The vast majority of students are not trying to unlock the secret of sounding like their favorite teacher. I imagine there are a few variables involved. First, I have spent the better part of three decades working roughly 5-10 skills. There’s something sad about that. Scales, arpeggios, sound quality, instinct and control of metronomic time, intonation, imbuing individual notes and groups of notes with life and song, articulation… Tony Prisk calls it “laying bricks,” and I can’t think of a better way to put it than that. But bricks are boring.
Second, part of our job as teachers is teaching students what to want. That’s a process, for sure. It’s conditioned, and conditioning takes time. It also takes the right people, which take time to find and bring into a studio. It’s not that I want everyone to want to be an orchestral trumpeter, but I want them to want to sound good. I want them to sometimes think about music when they’re walking down the street. I want them to be humming a passage that is haunting them when they’re chilling with friends. I want them to look forward to their concerts, to be excited to try things in the practice room, and to find new repertoire that speaks to them. I want them to have friends that are also into music. I want them to want to have friends that are also into music. I want them to want to be good educators or performers or both, and to be willing to work toward those outcomes without the threat of a bad lesson grade. We aren’t there yet, but we are working on it.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m a boring teacher. I am not saying that I am the best player or that anyone should look to me as any kind of role model. But I do enjoy being around driven people, and I hope at least some small, tiny part of my playing and personality are worth emulating. If nothing else, my perseverance. But in my pursuit of being the best player I can, I am losing touch with the pyrotechnics and meme-able content that make teaching memorable for students. And I don’t know how to reconcile those two things.