After thirty years of teaching lessons, I have come to a realization: it’s easy to teach children. When we must start with just the headjoint, there’s a clear progression of goals and methods, and their energy and enthusiasm raise my own energy and enthusiasm up to their level. As they grow, there are regular competition opportunities, recitals, and other goals to meet, and we work to meet them, refining the fundamental skill set along the way. From the beginning of my years as a lessons teacher, this progression felt very organic and natural to me. It still does!
I used to have a really hard time teaching my adult students. There weren’t clear deadlines, clear endings for projects, clear long term goals. Were we meant to just float along week to week without the build up and catharsis that come from recitals and auditions?
As with so many things, with age comes clarity, and now I can say confidently that yes, that’s exactly what we are meant to do! And that’s a large part of the beauty of those lessons.
In graduate school, I had my first adult student. He worked in the shoe department at a large department store and had never played the flute before. He was older than my dad, soft spoken and dapper. He was patient with me as I learned not to speak to him as if he were a child, despite our using the beginner method that I still use with children. While I have long since forgotten his name, I will never forget that he just wanted and outlet for creativity, a chance to play, and a chance to learn.
Two years later, working on a doctorate in a different city, I had more opportunities to learn that lesson over again—that adult students are wonderful, and yes, we just float along, learning. I was in the suburbs of DC, and over the four years I lived there, I taught four young adults (still older than me at that time, in perfect honesty!) who all worked at the World Bank. There was Bruno, who was French, would never tell me exactly what he did, and who disappeared after 9/11. There was a married couple from Mexico who shared a flute and would take lessons one right after the other at a charming music store on New Hampshire Ave. Meeting and working with them made me begin to realize, for the very first time, how large, rich and culturally diverse Mexico is. They were lovely and I remember them fondly! Finally, there was a young Turkish woman who had played flute growing up and wanted to reconnect with music. She studied with me until the store went out of business, and we cried the last time we said goodbye.
During those DC years, I also spent a few semesters directing a senior citizen flute choir at a local community college. Again, at age 24, I felt resentful sometimes for the way that job took up so much of my Sunday afternoons. They wanted to sit down, but I wouldn’t let them. Flute choirs were supposed to stand! Now, at 48, that is definitely a place I wish I could go back to, to be more understanding, to do a better job…to let them sit down. They were delightful, many of them older than my grandparents at that point, and their patience with me was grace I didn’t always deserve.
These people and their experiences enriched my world, and I wish so much that I could know them now, with the development I have gained as a teacher over the past couple of decades. Then, I was sometimes impatient. Why would’t they practice? Didn’t they want to progress? I should have focused that question inwardly. What IS progress for an adult student? What matters to them?
There have been so many more adult students over the years, and right now I have three students who are regularly with me and a few more who just call me up to have a lesson now and then. When they come to see me, instead of feeling frustrated that I don’t know what to offer them, I have learned to ask them what they would like to accomplish. Together, we set goals, and together, we meet them. They have good weeks and bad weeks. Perhaps, as an middle-aged adult myself, I have finally learned so much more about the ways that your actual life can derail your carefully set plans. Family members require care, work requires attention and life goes gleefully off on a newly carved path. I have learned to let the experience be about them and their needs, rather than my arbitrary ideas of proper progress at an acceptable speed. These days, we happily float along together, enjoying the journey along with the ultimate destination.