In the world of providing instrumental music lessons, there’s an unwritten code out there.

Let’s say you’re a musician turned businessperson and you want to start a private music school. You rent the premises, you do the advertising, you pay the bills, and you hire teachers to teach for you and you split the takings with them 50-50.

Fair enough. You have overheads and you also need to make a profit. Without you, the school wouldn’t exist, without the teachers, the school wouldn’t exist either. 50-50 is fair.

It’s amazing how universal this business model is. I’ve taught in music schools in Germany, Malaysia, and New Zealand and 50-50 seems to be the magic number. But there’re exceptions. I’ve even been paid up to 70 percent and I know there’s a music school here that actually pays 75 percent to their teachers.

Now, suppose a businessperson comes along and he decides to change this model to 75-25, in his favor. (Without naming names, I know of at least one establishment that’s doing this.)

Let’s say he’s surveyed the market and he’s discovered that there’re a lot of hungry music students who would take the job even at 25 percent. Especially since some of them are working minimum wage jobs at the local McDonalds.

In his mind, teaching guitar is no different from flipping hamburgers and he reasons he’s doing these hungry music students a favor by offering them a job that pays more than minimum wage.

(For our discussion, let’s say that the going rate for lessons is $40 per hour lesson or $20 per half-hour lesson. 25 percent of $40 is $10, much better than the minimum wage of $7.25.)

Here we come to the basic question of fairness. Which is what the occupy movement is all about.

Fairness depends on who you ask.

If you were to ask the teachers, they would probably say it’s not fair, if you were to ask a businessperson, he would probably say it’s fair, he has a right to make a profit.

As a teacher, you can probably guess where I stand on this issue.

To me, it’s clear that teaching guitar is not the same as flipping hamburgers. It takes years of practice and training for someone to get to the point where he can sit down and teach someone to play guitar. (In some cases, four years of college with all the attached costs.) It takes less than ten minutes to teach a person to flip a hamburger.

You decide if it’s fair to equate teaching guitar with flipping hamburgers.

I agree that the profit motive is important. Businesses exist to make a profit. But how much profit is reasonable profit and how much is greed?

If the only motive in businesses is to make a profit, I would say, why not go all the way? Why stop at 25 percent? Why not zero percent? They did that years ago. It’s called slavery.

I probably have the biggest collection of the Tao Te Ching in Texas. This photo of my bookshelf will attest to that. Twenty-five different versions in the photo with at least one stray version which I couldn’t locate.

What is it about this ancient text that holds such fascination for me?

I had never given it much thought until I found one of my latest additions in a bookstore recently – Chad Hansen’s new translation. (The striking blue book in the photo.)

I normally don’t get excited by new books, especially new translations of the Tao Te Ching. They follow pretty much the same pattern, the same formulaic approach. But Mr. Hansen’s version caught my eye immediately.

The standard procedure for pretty much the past hundred years has been to translate the second character ‘te’ as ‘virtue,’ (some have also translated it as ‘power’) but in his new translation, Mr. Hansen translated it as ‘virtuosity.’

Now you can see why I was so excited.

I suddenly saw my two biggest passions in life – the Tao Te Ching and virtuosity – converging in one place.

I decided to google ‘te’ and ‘virtuosity’ and I found that other authors have also latched on to this new translation of ‘te.’ Mr. Hansen is not so unique after all.

But who started this trend? Who was the first to have the nerve to buck over one hundred years of literary tradition and change the translation of ‘te’ from ‘virtue’ to ‘virtuosity?’ I have yet to find the answer. Perhaps it is Mr. Hansen himself.

It doesn’t matter, but it clarified everything for me.

I suddenly understood why I have been so fascinated with the book since I discovered it years ago in the school library. It’s because it mirrors perfectly my fascination with virtuosity. All these years, I had always intuitively sensed that the TTC is a manual on virtuosity, and not the heavy philosophical tract that it’s made out to be by scholars.

So does that make my AOV obsolete?

No, the AOV deals with the nuts and bolts of achieving virtuosity. It is an eminently practical book.

While the TTC approaches virtuosity from a more philosophical standpoint, and is mostly a collection of aphorisms about achieving virtuosity.

If you’re interested in Mr. Hansen’s translation, here’s a link to one of his earlier versions:

http://terebess.hu/english/tao/hansen.html

The printed version differs slightly from this online version.

My good friend Miguel de Maria asked me if I could write a few words on how to prepare pieces for performance. I really don’t have much to say as I don’t have any fixed system, so I thought I’ll just share some general observations on what I’ve seen others do.

Over the past years, I’ve hired a number of handymen and repairmen and one thing I’ve noticed, they all seem to have different levels of commitment and standards when it comes to their work.

Some take a lot of care in what they do, they would stand back, admire what they’ve done, and they would not stop until they’re fully satisfied with their work, while others would simply slapdash the job together and call it finished and leave.

What do handymen and repairmen have to do with preparing pieces for performance, you ask?

Quite a bit, in fact.

I’ve noticed the same varying levels of dedication and commitment in players when it comes to preparing pieces for commitment.

For instance, some players are just concerned with notes.

They will simply learn the notes and they think they’re ready for prime time. They totally ignore rhythm (and other aspects of music) and they play without any reference to a rhythmic pulse.

If you were to ask them to tap their foot when they play, they will be unable to do so because they have no idea where the beat is. This is the first level of commitment.

At the second level, you find players who are a little more sophisticated. They will faithfully read the notes and rhythms, but they totally ignore fingerings – left-hand or right-hand. In fact, you will see them grabbing the first notes they can find with their fingers when they play.

At the third level, players become aware of the need for good left-hand fingerings so they take time to read them in the score and apply them. Some will even come up with their own fingerings.

But they’re impatient to learn the piece, so they ignore right-hand fingerings because they don’t think it’s important. And because they don’t have any thought-out right-hand fingerings, they often end up playing with the same right-hand finger on consecutive notes.

This may work okay during practice but they quickly find that the repeated use of the same finger on consecutive notes can create havoc during performances.

At the fourth level, players become even more sophisticated. They take care reading the notes and their rhythmic values. They work on fingerings – left hand and right hand – and if you were to look at their working scores, it’s full of penciled-in fingerings for the left hand and right hand.

But there’re no dynamic and expressive markings. They’re so focused on the technicalities of executing the music, they haven’t put much thought into expression. Their playing is stiff and dry and mechanical.

At the fifth level, players have all the fundamentals in place, they make sure they read the notes and rhythmic values carefully. They invest time in finding out the best fingerings that will allow them to execute the notes in the most efficient ways possible.

And they analyze the music and come up with a clear plan of execution. Their scores are full of fingerings, dynamics, and other expressive markings.

And when they play, you feel as if they know exactly what they want to do in the music. Their playing is full of shadings and dynamic contrasts, with clearly defined climaxes and cadences.

But something is missing still. Their music doesn’t sound right. It’s almost as if they have learned all the words but they’re pronouncing them all wrong.

At the sixth level, players take care of all the basics – notes, rhythms, fingerings, dynamics, articulations, sectional contrasts etc.

But they go one step further. They spend time immersing themselves in the music they’re playing. And they do this in a fundamental way – through listening.

If they play South American music, they will listen to all the South American musicians they can find, from popular to folk to classical. If they play Fernando Sor, they will spend time absorbing the music of Mozart and other Classical composers, and if they play Tarrega, they will listen to Chopin and other Romantic composers.

They know music is not just a bunch of dots on a page but a living vibrant thing and to make it come alive, you must immerse yourself in it and feel it at your very core.

So they listen and they practice, and they don’t stop until they’re able to get the music to sound just right, with all its natural inflections and nuances.

To go back to that language analogy, until they’re able to speak it like the natives.

Six very generalized approaches, each one reflecting a different level of commitment and priority.

It’s not easy to be a guitarist these days. Good guitar players are a dime a dozen. Just check out youtube and you’ll see what I mean.

So how do you make an impact? How do you stand out from the crowd?

You become extraordinary.

And that’s the subject of my latest book, “How to be Extraordinary.”

The book is drawn on my experiences in the trenches and learned from the greats. It’s guided me in my own career, both in my programming and in my CDs.

If you’re an up-and-coming artist, the book is especially relevant to you. Because it explains the processes you need to go through, to get noticed in an increasing crowded field.

If you already own an earlier version of the AOV, you might recognize the title from a chapter in those earlier versions. The book expands on the ideas in that chapter.

As usual, the 60 day guarantee applies. If you don’t think you’ve learned anything from the book, let me know within 60 days and I’ll issue you a full refund.

To order the book, please click on this link:

https://philiphii.com/purchase/

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 instruction.

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.

Being a teacher is a thankless task.

Students have little respect for you, administration thinks you’re shirking your duties and are constantly evaluating you, and politicians use you as a punching bag.

Take the recent appearance of Michelle Rhee on Tavis Smiley.

Her basic message was simple:

If students are not doing well, blame the teachers (and their unions).

It’s the same old refrain that bureaucrats have been echoing for years. As a teacher, I’m frankly sick and tired of hearing it.

Because amidst these debates, one point seems to be consistently missed.

Learning is a two-way street between teacher and student.

It can only occur when both parties participate fully in the process.

Zen masters like to compare teaching to pouring tea into a teacup — if the cup is full, no amount of pouring will make the cup accept more tea.

To expand on that analogy, if the cup is closed, no amount of pouring will make the tea go into the cup too.

And that’s the problem facing most of us teachers.

Despite our best efforts, if the other party (the student) refuses to participate in the process, there’s not much we can do.

No amount of coaxing, cajoling, and teaching gimmicks will make the student learn when he/she has closed their minds to learning.

But these days, it’s fashionable to blame teachers for all the failings in our school systems.

When schools fail and test scores are low, blame the teachers. Fire them, make them jump through more hoops, subject them to endless evaluations, require them to keep copious records of students’ progress.

Most educators in the trenches know that this is just so much smoke and mirrors. Mere posturing and theater. Administrators trying to look busy and engaged in their jobs. Politicians looking for an issue.

Because despite these fancy measures, standards have continued to decline.

I say it’s time for a new approach.

And that approach is to work on the receiving side – to open up students and make them receptive to learning.

Let me qualify that by saying that no, I’m not suggesting that all teachers are blameless. Good teachers are few and far in between, just as good doctors are few and far in between, just as good pastors are few and far in between. (Is there any profession or vocation that does not have their share of deadwood?)

But learning can take place even when the quality of the knowledge that is being poured into the cups is sub par (I can attest to that, having had my share of disengaged and disinterested teachers in my life), just as healing can take place even under mediocre doctors, perhaps just not as fast.

All we need are receptive students and for that, the responsibility lies squarely on the parents.

Parents have to get involved. They have to take an active interest in their children’s education. They have to encourage and motivate their children to learn, and provide a good environment at home for that learning to take place.

Until that happens, students will continue to be disinterested in learning and test scores will continue to be low.

To quote another old saying, “You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” You can bring a child to school but you can’t make him/her learn.

Back to the Tavis Smiley/Michelle Rhee interview.

Until October of 2010, Ms. Rhee was the chancellor of DC public schools. Soon after she left the school district, she formed a new student advocacy group, Students First.

One of the stated goals of the organization is to recruit one million members and raise $1 billion dollars in five years. (Yes, that’s $1 billion.)

This is an inordinately large amount which Tavis Smiley was quick to point out.

He asked her, does this amount suggest that she believes that lack of money is the problem for our schools?

To which Rhee provided a rather startling answer, the money is not going to schools or students. Instead, it will be used to pay lobbyists.

According to her, teachers’ unions and the AFT are spending $500 million a year on lobbyists, so if Students First wants to counteract their efforts, it has to spend at least $200 million a year on lobbyists too.

Brilliant solution! Only in America.

To put students first, pay $1 billion to lobbyists.

I’m sure test scores across the country will skyrocket with that bold and visionary move.