Philip Hii – guitarist

I’ve always been at odds with some of my colleagues over teaching philosophy.

Years ago, one of them even came up to me and told me point-blank, so you’re the guy with the weird ideas.

Well, if you call a flexible approach weird, then I plead guilty.

I believe in a flexible approach to teaching.

The core of my teaching is based on the belief that each student is unique and that we should customize the method to fit the individual rather than fit the student to the method.

One example is that of keeping the right-hand wrist in a straight line.

I’ve never believed in this straight wrist rule in right hand positioning because it’s just plain too rigid and don’t take into account each student’s unique physiology.

I won’t go into the details here because I’ve written about it quite exhaustively over the years.

In one of my last ruminations on the subject, I quoted a story from Osho about a mad king who tried to make everyone fit the length of his guest bed by either stretching them or chopping off their feet.

Well, as it turns out, the story is from Greek mythology about a certain man named Procustes. (Thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and The Bed of Procustes for pointing this out in the latter.)

So the need to enforce rigid ideas and exert absolute control is not such a recent phenomenon after all.

Such heartwarming news.

The thing of course, is that it’s much harder to teach from a flexible standpoint.

You’ll have to make many decisions, you’ll have to possess a multitude of solutions, and you also have to have the creativity to come up with new ones when the need arises.

Because there’s always the unexpected student with unusual needs.

For instance, this semester, for the first time in my teaching career, I came across a student who has a missing tendon in his right hand. This genetic condition prevents him from using his thumb in the ‘normal’ way.

Yes, it’s so much easier to teach the rigid way.

Because all you need is one method, one solution for everyone.

And you apply it across the board, no exceptions, no special considerations. One blanket implementation.

On the surface, it might seem that such a one-size-fits-all approach will have some advantages.

It has a clear structure — you’ll look organized to the student and will appear to know exactly what you’re doing. (The other way will make you appear to be improvising as you teach, without any fixed method.)

And that uniformity of approach, it shows no ‘favoritism’ – everyone gets the same dosage of attention and material.

But to me, the structure and uniformity is just a cover for laziness.

Because you’ve essentially abdicated your teaching duties and deferred them to a ‘higher authority.’

And all you’re doing is dispensing the prescriptions from the higher authority and making sure students follow them faithfully.

I wrote earlier about the two essential criteria for judging whether something is creative.

After I wrote the post, I began to get a feeling, a nagging sensation, that I was still missing something.

And then it came to me.

Of course.

The very idea of creativity presupposes that there’s a creator behind it.

That explains why a random collection of events or objects cannot be considered to be creative because there’s no evidence of a creator’s hand behind it.

And it debunks my earlier assertion that 4’33” is not creative.

Well, maybe not entirely.

If I were to go with just the earlier two definitions of newness and value, I still hold that it is not creative because it lacks aesthetic value (for me).

But if we consider its value not from the aesthetic standpoint, but from a philosophical one, it does fulfill all three conditions for creativity.

First, it is new.

Second, it has value from a philosophical standpoint. (It opens up our minds to what may or may not be considered music.)

Third, there’s a deliberate hand behind it.

And how about the other well-known artist with similar anarchistic tendencies, Jackson Pollock?

Can we consider his paintings to be creative because they seem be produced so randomly (by splashing paint on a canvas)?

When we consider that there’re an infinite number of ways to splash paint on a canvas, the fact he chooses one over another suggests that there’s deliberateness behind his actions, and that fulfills the criteria of deliberateness.

I love the sound of waves splashing on the shore. Or rain on the roof.

And watching the sun set over a smog-filled cityscape.

Do they fulfill the three conditions of creativity?

Newness? Value? Creator?

I’ll leave that for you to decide.

This is a continuation of my previous post, and expands on one of the points I raised in that post.

In a perfect world, learning occurs when a teacher imparts knowledge and a student receives that knowledge.

That’s all there is to it.

For years, this was the unwritten contract between teacher and student.

And teachers were especially wary of students who were not ready for instructions.

Martial arts lore is replete with stories of masters who would not accept students until they knew the student was ready.

I read about a martial arts teacher in Beijing who made a student exercise every day with him for three years (at a distance) before he would accept him as a student.

The great piano pedagogue Leschetitzky almost made Paderewski jump off a second story building to test his sincerity and eagerness to learn before he would accept him as a student.

But we live in a very imperfect world.

Being a teacher these days means many other things.

Now, we’re expected to become cheerleader, counselor, entertainer, babysitter, magician, parent, mentor, on top of our duties as ‘teacher.’

And the minute we assume the teacher mantle, we also become miracle workers – we’re expected to make students learn, no matter what.

And if students show no interest in learning, it’s our fault.

If they don’t do their homework, it’s our fault.

If they have low test scores, it’s our fault.

In other words, we teachers are one hundred percent guilty of any failings in the student’s education.

The student is blameless, the parents are blameless. The student bears no responsibility towards his own learning. The parents bear no responsibility towards their children’s education.

I’m not sure how and when this shift in perception of the teacher’s duties took place.

But suddenly we’re not just charged with imparting knowledge, we’re also charged with changing mindsets, we’re charged with making student receptive to our teaching.

And this is the crux of the problem.

That’s really not our job description.

That’s the parent’s job. That’s the parent’s responsibility.

It’s the job of parents to show an active interest in their child’s education, to make sure that homework is done, to provide a good learning environment at home, to encourage them, motivate them, fire up their ambitions.

In other words, it’s the job of parents to mentor their own children and make them receptive to learning.

If parents do this and step up to their responsibilities as parents, I guarantee test scores will go up across the board.

This is not rocket science, it’s just common sense.

Here’s a little anecdotal example from my own experience.

I went to school in a third world country. Classroom size was, on the average, 40 students per class.

And I remember some of the teachers were not the most enthusiastic and inspiring of teachers.

There was the science teacher whose idea of teaching was to copy endless notes on the chalkboard and we had to copy them down by hand. During tests, we had to memorize all these notes and regurgitate them.

There was the history teacher whose idea of teaching was to read from the textbook. He was so lazy, he didn’t even bother to read the book himself. Instead he would get one student after another to read it for him.

Not the most inspiring of situations. No fancy teaching techniques, no smart boards.

Just teacher, student, textbook, and chalkboard.

But did we learn?

As one famous politician is fond of saying, you betcha!

Because we were all fired up to learn. Yes, we still clowned around in class, but when the time came for testing and exams, we all knew we had to get serious.

The secret was expectations. Expectations from parents mostly.

If you didn’t do well, the shame you experience was enough to force you to study harder the next time. I remember having to show my ‘report card’ to my parents every term end. If the test scores were bad, it was more a matter of personal shame than any reprimand you could get from them.

Modern educators might shudder at the description I just gave.

But the proof is in the pudding.

Where are all these extremely ‘disadvantaged’ students now? Flung all across the globe, from New Zealand to Australia to Malaysia to Canada to the USA.

Engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, accountants, bankers, teachers, real estate developers, and yes, even a guitar professor in South Texas.

As I wrote earlier, teaching is a two way street.

For the transfer of knowledge to take place, the teacher must be willing and able to impart knowledge and the student to receive it.

And if the student is ready and receptive, learning will take place, even under the most adverse conditions.