Imagine you set out to climb a mountain. The view from the top is amazing, you’re told, and the journey is just so rewarding – full of challenge, novel experiences, and great opportunities. You’re excited and eager to climb the mountain. Maybe you come from a family of mountain climbers, or maybe you’ve just seen mountain climbers before – or maybe you just love mountains and want to learn how to climb them. Or maybe you’re a little unsure about this mountain climbing business, but your older sibling did it, or your best friend’s doing it, or you just needed some kind of mountain credit for school, and you figure it can’t be that bad, right? So here you are, at the foot of the mountain.
You’re assigned a guide in your mountain climbing – someone who has climbed the mountain, or at least part of the mountain, before. But they stand up at the top of the mountain and shout down to you, “Put your foot there! No, not there – THERE!” They tell you about paths that are open to you, but you can’t always see the paths – there are too many trees in the way. Heck, you can’t even really see the top of the mountain – just a few outcroppings along the way.
It’s slow going. The brush is dense. You see other mountain climbers around you. Some of them seem to make better progress than you – you don’t know how they do it. The guide’s instructions just seem to make more sense to them. Others fall behind. Some even quit, get off the mountain entirely, but you keep slogging on. Eventually, you figure, it’ll get easier… right?
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Learning is like climbing a mountain named Expertise. When you’re brand new at something, you stand at the foot of the mountain – excited, uncertain, unhappy, whatever – unable to see clearly the path up the mountain. You can’t see the top or how to get there. You can see some other people who made it to the top, and you try to ask them how they got there, but realistically you have to learn how to see the paths, avoid the brambles and poison ivy, and duck the branches all on your own.
Being a teacher is like standing at the top of Mount Expertise (okay, at least part of the way up). We’ve done the things we’re asking our students to do, and because we’ve already made it up the mountain, we forget that the student doesn’t always understand the context of the skills we build within them. They don’t understand why it’s important to work on their scales or rudiments. They don’t know why we’re such sticklers for proper technique. They can’t see the path yet, and they don’t really know how to be successful (or maybe even what success is).
We, as teachers, have to remember, that we’ve already slogged up the mountain. Because we’re looking downward, we have a bird’s-eye view of the paths. We do our best to direct students onto those paths, to help them avoid tripping on roots or slipping in the mud, but ultimately we have to remember that students can’t see what we can because they’re not up the mountain yet. We have to forgive them sometimes not wanting to commit to paths that, from their points of view, look like they meander nowhere, or wanting to take a path that looks like a shortcut (even though we can see that that shortcut ends in a precarious boulder garden on the edge of a cliff). We have to continually offer students glimpses of the view they’re trying to get to, in the form of steady small successes and reasonable challenges. And we should never forget that we also are not truly at the top of Mount Expertise: we are continually moving up it (hopefully!) ourselves, bettering our musicianship, our teaching, or both. In fact – we are all standing on multiple mountains at any given time, moving at different points on the slop of each. Maybe on Mount Musical Expertise, we’re near the pinnacle, but on Mount Knitting Expertise, we’re only a third of the way up. Maybe on Mount Return Emails In A Timely Fashion, we’re not even in the foothills! Each of us – like our students – is a work in progress on multiple fronts.
What we need to remember when we get frustrated at students who seem to resist our instructions, or who just can’t “get it,” is that we are standing at a high point on the mountain while they are still standing near the bottom. The view is thick, tangled, and confusing where they are. The path is not always clear to them, and the frustration of mud pits, mosquitoes, and scratchy thorns is valid. Our instructions – offered from a vantage point on high – don’t always make sense. Have patience, and try to remember your own trip up Mount Expertise.