There is something deeply satisfying about finishing a tutor book.
You start on page one.
You work your way through.
Page 12. Page 18. Page 27.
Eventually you reach the final page.
Finished.
Excellent.
The pupil has completed the book.
There is only one slight problem.
They can’t actually play half the things in it.
I used to be much worse at this
When I started teaching, I think I had a fairly straightforward idea of progress.
You did one thing.
Then you did the next thing.
Then the next.
If a pupil was on page 35, they were presumably better than a pupil on page 17.
This is wonderfully convenient.
It’s also nonsense.
Music doesn’t really work like that.
A pupil can successfully get through an exercise on Tuesday and have almost no idea how to play it the following Tuesday.
Of course, what happens between those two Tuesdays makes a difference. But as I explored in The Pupil Who Never Practises But Never Misses a Lesson, progress isn’t always the only reason a pupil keeps coming back.
They can play something perfectly at 4:15 and apparently have it surgically removed from their brain by 4:45.
I’ve seen both happen.
Many times.
“Yep, that’s fine. Next.”
This is the danger.
The pupil plays the exercise.
It’s mostly right.
There’s a slightly dodgy bit in bar three. The timing wanders in bar six. They stop once, but they restart quickly.
Good enough.
Tick.
Next page.
Do that for six months and you can cover an impressive amount of material.
Whether the pupil has actually learnt very much is another question.
I’ve become much less interested in how much material we get through and much more interested in what a pupil can actually do with it.
Can they play it again?
Can they play it without me?
Can they play it a little faster?
Can they play it a little slower?
Can they use the same idea somewhere else?
Can they still play it next week?
That last one can be particularly revealing.
Books are useful
This isn’t an anti-tutor-book rant.
I use books all the time, and I’ve even written books myself.
A good book gives lessons some structure. It introduces ideas in a sensible order. It saves me from having to reinvent every exercise I’ve ever taught.
It also gives pupils something tangible.
There’s a nice sense of progress in turning pages and seeing how far you’ve come.
The problem starts when finishing the book becomes the objective.
The book is supposed to help me teach the pupil.
I’m not supposed to help the pupil complete the book.
Those sound like the same thing.
They aren’t.
Sometimes the best thing to do is go backwards
This can feel surprisingly uncomfortable as a teacher.
You’ve reached page 42.
Then you realise something isn’t quite working.
The pupil’s reading has become shaky. Their technique has gone a bit strange. They’re getting through the exercises, but only because they’ve become extremely good at watching you demonstrate them first.
So you go back.
Page 31.
Or page 20.
Or you close the book completely and do something else.
That isn’t failure.
Sometimes it’s exactly what needs to happen.
I’ve had pupils make more progress by spending three weeks properly understanding one idea than they would have made by completing another fifteen pages.
Progress doesn’t always look like moving forwards.
Annoyingly.
It would be much easier to measure if it did.
The pupil doesn’t know what page they’re supposed to be on
This is worth remembering.
Teachers worry about pace.
It’s a similar problem to the one I discussed in Do Music Grades Actually Matter?. Having something measurable to work towards can be useful, but it’s easy to start treating the measurement as the point of the exercise.
We wonder whether we’re moving quickly enough. Whether we should have covered more by now. Whether another teacher would have got this pupil further through the book.
The pupil generally has no idea.
They haven’t seen our imaginary schedule.
They don’t know that somewhere in our head we’ve decided they ought to be three pages further ahead.
They’re just having a music lesson.
If they’re learning, playing, improving and enjoying themselves, it probably doesn’t matter that page 46 remains stubbornly unvisited.
Sometimes we don’t need the book at all
Some of my favourite lessons have happened when we’ve barely touched the thing I thought we were going to do.
A pupil mentions a song.
We listen to it.
There’s a rhythm in it that relates to something we’ve been working on.
We try it.
That leads to something else.
Twenty-five minutes later we’ve had a really productive lesson and the carefully planned page of the tutor book is still sitting untouched on the music stand.
Years ago, I might have worried that we’d got distracted.
Now I think that sometimes the distraction is the lesson.
Obviously there are limits.
If every lesson consists of abandoning the plan after three minutes and watching random music videos, we may have a problem.
But a lesson doesn’t become good simply because we completed what we’d planned.
And it doesn’t become bad because we didn’t.
So when do you move on?
I don’t think there’s a neat answer.
Sometimes something needs to be secure before you continue.
It’s much the same principle behind practising until something is done rather than simply watching the clock. The important question isn’t always how long you’ve spent on something, but what you can actually do afterwards.
Sometimes it’s fine to introduce the next idea and revisit the previous one later.
Sometimes a pupil needs another week.
Sometimes they need another month.
Sometimes they need you to stop making them play the same bloody exercise because they’re bored senseless and beginning to hate both it and you.
Teaching is useful like that.
Just when you think you’ve found a rule, a pupil arrives who proves it wrong.
So yes, use the book.
Write in it. Skip bits. Go backwards. Jump forwards. Photocopy the useful page if you’re allowed to. Put it away for three weeks. Bring it back.
Just don’t confuse reaching the end with learning.
They’re not the same thing.
And if the pupil never quite reaches the final page?
I think we’ll all survive.