Education Versus Experience

I can't remember the official title of the class, but it was known as "ED 500."

Twice a week, we would drive to a couple of local elementary schools to teach instrumental group classes to the students. My groups were the saxophone kids.

All the sophomore music education majors were required to take this class.

The point of the class was to make sure music education majors really wanted to do this with their lives. So, even if people changed majors (which many did after this class), that was considered success.

You'd think they require that class freshman year, right?

My very first class, I was all excited. My lesson plan looked good. I carefully arranged the chairs for the students' arrival. I adjusted them ever so slightly so they would make a perfect semicircle.

Then, the children came in.

Within seconds, my perfect semicircle was destroyed. The lesson plan did not go as planned (no pun intended). I got the kids to make a sound by the end of 50 minutes, which I considered a serious victory by the time the class was over.

This first experience would be symbolic of the struggle between education versus experience.

We take the classes in college that talk about how education should work. We teach mock classes to the rest of the class, which will always go well because the other students are college music majors. We create the lesson plans that seem logical enough.

But then, we enter the real world and discover the reality is nothing like the classes.

Piano pedagogy is in a similar boat.

The pedagogy books say nothing about what to do when a student shows up two months in a row unprepared.

The pedagogy books also don't really talk about how make lessons interesting...

Many of the piano pedagogy books are straight up tutorials on how to teach technique, reading, theory, and more in an ideal world where every student loves music and follows the assignments to the letter.

Not so much in reality.

But then, if it were, teaching would be kind of boring, wouldn't it?

I imagine it's the same in other fields. You learn what's supposed to happen. Then, you learn how the world actually works.

In the end, you can't judge a teacher by his education. Experience is what makes the difference. Not only experience, but how a teacher learns from that experience to try to make the student experience remarkable.

And that's something you just won't find in a degree or a textbook.