Thirty minutes.
That’s how long most of my instrumental lessons last.
Half an hour, once a week.
In that time, I’m supposed to teach a pupil how to play an instrument.
Not all of it, obviously. That would be ambitious.
But I’m expected to help them develop technique, reading skills, coordination, timing, listening, musical understanding and the ability to play something that vaguely resembles the piece of music in front of them.
Sometimes we’re preparing for an exam. Sometimes there’s a concert coming up. Sometimes they’ve brought in a song they desperately want to learn.
And occasionally we have to spend the first five minutes locating a pair of drumsticks.
Thirty minutes.
It isn’t very long, is it?
It’s quite a responsibility for something that takes less time than an episode of most television programmes.
Three-Tenths of One Percent
Let’s do some maths.
There are 168 hours in a week.
If a pupil sleeps for nine hours a night, that leaves 105 waking hours.
A thirty-minute lesson represents approximately 0.48% of that time.
Except there’s another problem.
I don’t teach pupils for 52 weeks a year.
Allowing for school holidays, I teach most of my pupils for approximately 33 weeks each year.
That’s sixteen and a half hours.
Out of 5,460 waking hours in a year.
0.3%.
That’s how much of their waking year I actually spend teaching them.
The other 99.7%?
They’re on their own.
Well, not entirely. They have parents, teachers, friends, YouTube and occasionally a metronome.
But I’m not there.
And somehow, I’m supposed to help them become musicians.
The Temptation to Teach Everything
One of the mistakes I made when I started teaching was trying to fit too much into a lesson.
We’d do some technique. A bit of reading. A new exercise. Something from the tutor book. Perhaps a piece for an exam. Then I’d remember something else they needed to work on.
And just before they left, I’d introduce another exciting new concept.
There you go. Plenty to practise.
Except there was a problem.
We’d covered lots of things, but hadn’t necessarily learnt very much.
There’s a difference.
It’s something I’ve written about in Stop Trying to Finish the Book. Getting through material isn’t the same as understanding it.
And when you’ve only got thirty minutes, it’s remarkably easy to confuse being busy with making progress.
Watching Me Play Isn’t Learning
Here’s another trap.
A pupil is struggling with something.
I demonstrate it.
They watch.
I demonstrate it again, slightly slower.
They nod.
I explain what’s happening. Perhaps I play it once more, because I’m enjoying myself now.
Lovely.
I’ve played it beautifully.
Unfortunately, I’m not the one having the lesson.
Demonstrating is important, of course. Pupils need to see and hear what they’re aiming for.
But they also need time to try it, get it wrong, work out why it went wrong and try again.
That process takes time.
And it’s usually more valuable than watching me perform another magnificent demonstration.
Disappointing, but true.
One Thing Done Properly
These days, I’m much happier spending a significant part of a lesson working on one thing.
Perhaps a pupil is rushing a particular passage.
We slow it down. We work out where the problem is. We isolate the difficult movement. We put it back into the music.
They try again.
It’s better.
We try it once more.
Better again.
That might take fifteen minutes.
And that’s fine.
Because the pupil has actually improved something.
They’ve also learnt a little about how to approach a problem when they’re practising on their own.
Which, given the amount of time I get to spend with them, is rather important.
The Other 99.7%
Of course, the obvious answer to the thirty-minute problem is practice.
What happens between lessons makes an enormous difference.
A pupil who plays regularly will generally make much faster progress than one who only touches their instrument during their weekly lesson.
But simply telling somebody to practise isn’t particularly helpful.
They need to know what to do.
That’s why I’ve become increasingly particular about giving pupils clear, achievable tasks rather than a vague instruction to spend twenty minutes practising.
As I explained in Practice Till It’s Done, Not Till the Timer Goes Off, I’d rather a pupil spent five minutes achieving something specific than twenty minutes watching the clock.
Our job isn’t just to teach them what to play.
It’s to teach them how to get better when we’re not there.
And Then There’s Everything Else
Even when a lesson goes according to plan, thirty minutes disappears remarkably quickly.
There’s the time spent getting ready.
Finding the right music.
Checking what happened last week.
Writing down what needs practising.
And occasionally explaining that no, we can’t spend the entire lesson discussing Minecraft.
Although I have learnt quite a lot about Minecraft over the years.
Then there are the things that happen outside the lesson itself.
Preparation, administration, communicating with parents, organising resources and rearranging lessons when the school timetable inevitably develops a mind of its own.
I’ve written about that side of the job in The Lesson Doesn’t End When the Pupil Leaves the Room.
The thirty minutes are only the visible part.
Make It Count
After more than three decades of teaching, I don’t think the answer is to cram more into every lesson.
Quite the opposite.
I think we need to be more selective about what we teach, clearer about what we’re trying to achieve and more willing to spend time making sure something has actually been understood.
Sometimes a lesson will involve several different things.
Sometimes we’ll spend most of it on four bars of music.
Sometimes we’ll abandon the plan completely because something more important has come up.
That’s teaching.
We have thirty minutes.
We can’t teach everything.
But we can make sure something worthwhile happens.
And if the pupil remembers what that something was when they get home, even better.