5 Things Your Teacher Can’t Do For You - and 5 Things She or He Can - PHH 220

What I usually focus on when I tell that story is the learning that I got from it as far as what I needed to do to move my heart playing forward. But there's another part to that too, and that's what I forget to tell you. I forget to tell you that my own teaching was greatly informed and greatly directed by the learning that I had to do. By the learning about how to take responsibility, how to direct my energies, and how to really become my own best teacher. And that enabled me to work with my teacher in a new way. Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us. Just go to harpmastery.com join now. That's harpmastery.com joinharp now. Welcome to the show. You've heard me say this before. I had wonderful teachers throughout my musical life. From my very first piano teacher when I started piano at age four, through my harp studies from age eight and my college years at the Curtis Institute of Music, my teachers were all I could have wanted. They nurtured me, encouraged me, pushed me and took me to task when that was required. And believe me, it was required from time to time. Most importantly, and this is one of my core teaching principles to this day, they were as invested in my musical journey as I was. They took my learning and my musical growth personally, not as a reflection on them, but as a mission that mattered to them because my music mattered to me. It would be easy to say that they were the inspirations for my own teaching path, but truly, the path itself showed up more more or less by accident. But as is the case with so many blessings, it showed up when I needed it and led me in directions I could never have expected. At each step along the way, I have learned more about what it means to be a teacher and more particularly to be the kind of teacher I want to be for those I am honored to teach. I'll share a few more specifics about some of those steps on that path in a few moments, but my primary mission today is to share with you a few things I have discovered about how the ways we teachers think about our teaching and how many students think about their learning can be either useful and productive, or possibly not. These are big picture concepts that may help you, if you are a student, get even more value from your lessons. And if you're a teacher, perhaps these will inspire you to keep bringing the joy to the students you are privileged to work with. Or if you're a harpist who is neither teaching nor taking lessons at the moment, there might be some ideas that will give you some food for thought, maybe even energize your harp playing in a new way. I certainly hope so. That's part of my job coaching you here on the podcast today. Teaching concepts are on my mind right now because I'm preparing for our October teachers retreat and this is our first ever retreat that is just for harp teachers. And I'm so excited about this chance to work collaboratively with harp teachers who are committed to their students and committed to their teaching, to learning new ways to sharing the ways they have this is going to be a wonderful sort of a mastermind, relaxing kind of weekend. The sort of thing where we can participate in some discussions and can share tools and pedagogy and new music, where we can do some ensemble playing maybe, and maybe just have some extra practice time, quiet time, or perhaps just relax by the pool. There are a lot of ways that we are going to refresh and rejuvenate and reinvigorate our teaching at this weekend. And if you are a harp teacher, I certainly hope you consider joining us. All the information that you need you'll be able to find on our webpage. I've linked to it in the Show Notes or you can find it at harpmastery.com under upcoming events. As I said, this is our first ever teacher's retreat and of course I'll be sharing some of the strategies and the principles that we use to guide our certified coaching program and that I have shared with our accredited teachers. So you'll get some of that inside information as well. So please go ahead, check it out on the website, use the link in the Show Notes if you need to. Or it's under upcoming events@hartmastery.com and if you are a harp teacher, I certainly hope to see you there. In the meantime, our Super Summer Challenge continues in the Heart Mastery Hub. We are up to week eight and we've got lots of people participating and I hope you are one of them. I do want you to head over to the app if you haven't done that in a little while, and check out our new courses page that is in the app. There's lots of learning there for you. There are some free courses and some paid courses and feel free to get in there and explore. It's all about learning. It's all about sharing. And you know what? It's all in the app. A moment ago when I introduced today's topic, I used a phrase which may or may not have been one that you use often. It may not have been one you thought about with harp learning or harp teaching, but I used the phrase bringing the joy because I think that we as teachers have that as a primary job to inspire and to energize. There are lots of things that we do, but instruction is only part of that, obviously. And this resonates with a quote by a very famous teacher, and that's Annie Sullivan. Macy Ann Sullivan was the teacher. I know it sounds like I'm talking about myself and I'm not, and she's no relation. But she was the teacher of Helen Keller. And her persistence in her teaching of Helen Keller and her determination to bring her into the world of the living, essentially right, was so crucial and such a. A beacon of hope for anybody who's ever taught or studied. But this is the quote that always inspires me. She said, education is not the filling of a pail as in a bucket. Right. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. And I think that that's what we do. And that's why I used the phrase bringing the joy. Lighting the fire is another way to say it, but it' all about inspiration. And when we start there, I think we have the right way to consider not only our teaching as teachers, but our learning as students. We come with the joy, and we need our teacher to continue to fuel that. But as students, we often come expecting our teacher to be the only one to do that work. I mean, think about it. If you've taken music lessons as a child, you go to your piano lesson or your harp lesson or your flute lesson or whatever it is, and your teacher just tells you what to do, and you do it. And that's pretty much your job. And what I have experienced in my own teaching is that sometimes I'll have an adult student come to me, and they still want to be there. That's like, well, you tell me what to do next. They still want to be in that place where the teacher runs everything. And I don't think that's ever the right place, even to some extent with a very young student. I don't think the teacher needs to direct as much as to lead, but it requires input, and it requires excitement and it requires energy, and it requires joy from the student as well as from the teacher. Yes, but it has to come from the student. As adult students, part of your job is to show up with the same level of energy that you expect from your teacher. Now, you're listening to this podcast, so obviously you care about your harp playing, and so you're saying to yourself, at least I hope you are. I already do that, and that's wonderful. But I want to talk about some very specific things that you can do to help you and your teacher work together better. It's not that you're not getting along. That's not what I mean. It's not that you're not making progress, but these are ways that you can harness the extra power that comes from when two people are pulling in the same direction the same way. This is something that's at the core of all the coaching that we do here at Harp Mastery. And it's something that comes from my own experience as a student. You've probably heard me talk about this moment in my harp journey before, but I want to you give tell it to you again briefly today with a slightly different spin. This is the time when I was at Curtis. I was finishing my first year there. So I was 18 years old and my teacher, who had been a real champion, I mean, I thought she was on my, on my side, thought I was a really good student. And all of a sudden she was frustrated with me. I couldn't do anything right. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. It was a very difficult year. And in fact I was the verge of. Well, I won't say I was on the verge of getting kicked out of school, but I will say that my teacher had told me that if I didn't figure this out over the summer, she really couldn't have me continue at school. A little bit different from getting kicked out, but kind of with the same upshot. So for me, this was really, really important. You know, my future, as I had always envisioned it, was hanging in the balance. So I needed to do something. So this was the summer that I took and figured out a lot of stuff about my heart playing. And I came back and everything was good. And that's the short version of the story. And it has a happy ending because here I am talking to you today. But what I usually focus on when I tell that story is the learning that I got from it as far as what I needed to do to move my heart playing forward. But there's another part to that too, and that's what I forget to tell you. I forget to tell you that my own teaching was greatly informed and greatly directed by the learning that I had to do. By the learning about how to take responsibility, how to direct my energies and how to really become my own best teacher. And that enabled me to work with my teacher in a new way. I was no longer looking for my teacher to give me direction, but rather I was showing up with the direction and asking for guidance as to how to get where I wanted to go. And I realized that may seem like a no brainer to you for me Personally, at age 18, it was a revelation and it was a very different way of looking at my harp experience. Now over the years that grew into our coaching program motto, which is that our coaches serve as a compass, challenge and champion. This is not an advertisement for our coaching program. Although if you want to work with one of our coaches, you know we'd love to have you, so that's fine. But I'm bringing this up right now because I want you to consider those three words because they're so important to me. A coach or a teacher is there to be your compass. They're your guide. It's not exactly the same as a map, is it? If you have a map, you can use the map to give you the route. And it's not the same as saying, well, I don't know, where do I want to go today? And having somebody else tell you, you are setting the direction you are setting your goal would be another word or just even the thing that you want to do. The most meaningful part of playing the harp for you. And then the teacher can be your compass to help you get where you want to go. And along the way, they are there to challenge you. I truly believe that a teacher's role or a coach's role is to help get you there faster. And to do that, they have to show you where you can do more than you think right now. That's the challenge. And then, of course, there's the champion part of this. A coach or a teacher is there to support you, to encourage you when you need it, to celebrate with you when there's a win. So they're on your side. They are your champion. And those are the three words that I chose as the motto, the core principle in our coaching program. And now you know why. But let's step down from these lofty ideas for a moment because I want to talk about those things I promised I would talk about those five things. I don't know if there are only five, but I picked five for today that a teacher can't do for you, but what they can do for you instead. What I think you'll see is how congruent these five things are with the principles that I've just been talking about. At least I certainly hope you see that. So here's the first one to consider, and it goes right along with our compass idea. A teacher can't choose your path for you, but a teacher can guide you along the path you choose. Right. A teacher can't choose your path for you, but a teacher can guide you along the path you choose. I have seen students get stuck here when they don't have an overall direction or an overall goal or something that is motivating their heart playing. Then they can end up relying on a teacher or coach to give them the direction to Go. Granted, we can help you with that. We can help guide you. Well, what kind of music do you like? Where did you want to play? Who did you want to play for? What do you think you might want to work on? We can ask those questions and guide you. But if I as your teacher, say, okay, great, the next piece we're going to work on is this, and then it turns out that you don't really enjoy working on that piece or that wasn't something you had in mind, and you don't even tell me that, then we're not doing either of us or the music any favors. We all need to be moving in the same direction here, and we need to figure out what that direction is. So when you say, well, what should I do next? Oh, I hate that question. What should I do next? There's no should. There's only what's right for you right now. I can make suggestions, and I will, absolutely, but I can't make the choice for you. So I need you to tell me what you like and what you don't like. There's no one way to get where you want to go. There are lots of ways to do that, and we can explore those various ways. But you really need to know a little bit about where you want to go, and it helps if you share that with me. One of the things I like my students to think about is their most meaningful goal. Aside from playing a particular piece or playing in a particular place, what about playing the harp really means something to them? That's the level where we can connect. We can connect my assistance to the student's goals, and we connect the student to the harp, which is so important. Then we have a real idea of where we need to go, whether we have a specific plan or not, and we can work on that. So that was number one on my list. Here's number two. A teacher can't help you make progress by herself. You have to pull the rope too, of course. Right? That, once again, feels like it almost doesn't need to be said. It's so obvious. Yet at the same time, so many students count on their teacher to really pull them ahead. And let me tell you, that is a tiring job for a teacher. So you need to to do the progress work yourself. And in this case, what I'm really talking about by progress work is you need to understand what those next steps are and then push yourself toward them. If the teacher's role is to challenge you, it's your job to rise to the challenge. So you need to be pushing yourself as well. Now, please don't get the wrong idea and think that I believe that every lesson needs to be at that kind of a high energy driven level. I don't. That's not healthy for us either. But progress comes from continually working at the forward steps. It doesn't come from repeating the same steps over and over again. And that's where I think the students can really help the teacher help them. And if you're both pulling that rope in the same direction at the same time, you will make progress faster. Item number three. A teacher can't practice for you, but an occasional working lesson can be really productive. What's a working lesson? Well, I'll give you an example. You're a harp student. You had a terrible, terrible week. You haven't had any chance to practice. And, and so you call up your teacher and you say, oh, you know, I haven't had any chance to practice. Can we put off our lesson for another week? Now, sometimes there's a good reason to do that. Like, okay, we needed to make some progress here, so we needed to get some things done, so let's give you another week to do it. But sometimes putting off that lesson, particularly if the lessons are spaced farther apart, longer apart than one week, sometimes it's more helpful to have that lesson anyway and get back on track. But nobody wants to go into a lesson and play badly. You know, you haven't had a chance to practice and you go in and you say, I'm sorry, I'm really not prepared. And your teacher says, well, that's all right, let's start at the beginning and just play. It's like, argh. Okay, you know, that doesn't feel good. But when you and your teacher agree to have working lesson, then you can get back on track more quickly. So in a working lesson, what you do is you first of all say, okay, you know, haven't had a chance to practice, but this is what I think we need to work on. Or maybe your teacher will say, okay, let's choose this to look at today because I can help you make progress more quickly and we can make up for the time sort of that you didn't get to practice. I mean, obviously practice is a habit that needs to be consistent and if you don't practice, you won't make progress. It's that simple. And your progress needs to happen regularly. But we all have things that get in our way. And when you can say, all right, I had a bad week, but I'm showing up anyway, your teacher can help you say, all right, here's where we start. And we're going to work on this and we're going to move this forward in spite of your bad week. And that is something that usually leaves you feeling really inspired. You go out of that lesson thinking, wow, okay, I got a lot done. And it inspires you to go back and practice more. So that can get you back on track a lot faster than saying, well, you know, okay, I had a bad week, so I'm putting off my lesson. And then I didn't have an especially good week this week either, so I'll put my lesson off another week. That's obviously a downward spiral. We don't want to go there. So an occasional working lesson, we don't want to have those every week. An occasional working lesson can be productive. Now, I'll share a quick related story here with you. When I was at Curtis, one of the things that we did as part of our studies, we had to have secondary piano. I mean, if you were a piano major, you already had two lessons with two different teachers every week. But if you played another instrument, you were also expected to take piano lessons. And I did. And I had admitted to having a lot of piano background. So they gave me the hard teacher and we worked on a lot of hard stuff, but there. And I enjoyed it. But there were a couple other teachers that were known for being just a little bit more relaxed. They were teaching instrumentalists who had no desire to play the piano, but yet this was an important part of their all around musical training. There was one teacher in particular that was known for this. If you hadn't practiced that week, you just went in and said, gosh, I didn't get to practice this week. And she pulled out piano duets. And you read piano duets with her for the whole lesson. That was a long time ago. Things are a little bit different at Curtis now. But that's an example of a working lesson. You can learn a lot by reading through duets with your teacher. It can help you with reading. It can help you learn how to keep going instead of stopping for mistakes. It can help you with a lot of things. Now that's up to you and your teacher if that's how you spend a working lesson. But it can be kind of a fun thing to do. And now we get to number four on my list. A teacher can't tell you how long it will take, but she can show you the shortcuts. I know we all want to know, well, how long will it take me to learn this piece. How long will it take me before my fingers can play this fast? How long this, how long that? We could try to give you an estimate of one of those things, but that estimate can be thrown way off by any number of factors. So it's very difficult to tell any student exactly how long it will take them to do something. However, I can show you the fastest way to get it done. I can tell you what will work for most people most of the time to help them move forward faster. And, and that's my job. That's what we're there for. I can't promise you that it's going to take you just, oh, you'll learn this in three weeks. Can't promise you that. Although over time we'll come to understand your learning pattern. And I'll probably have a better idea of how long it might take you to do something. But I can show you the fastest and most effective way to get there. Shortcuts. Who knew? That's what teachers are really, really good at. Among other things. And that brings us finally to number five on my list. And it's a biggie. A teacher can't read your mind, but you can tell her what's on your mind. You may wonder why I included this on the list, because it seems so obvious. But if you're a teacher, if you've done any teaching at all, or perhaps even if you're a parent, you know, know that this can happen. There's this thing where the student wants to ask a question, but they really want you to answer the question before they've asked it. Sometimes they're just afraid to ask it. They're afraid to look silly or stupid or ignorant when really they're just a learner. And learners need to fill in the holes in their informational platform, right? That's what they're there for. So there can be reasons that they don't want to ask the question, but a teacher can't really read your mind. Although we try, of course. This is why I like to end most lessons with a question like this. Is there anything else we didn't get to today? Anything else I haven't talked about? Anything else you have a question about? I probe just a little bit to make sure that as far as I possibly can, I've dug out all the little concerns that might prevent a student from being able to do their best work during the week or two or whatever it is before I see them again. So if you have a question, please ask, ask them before you leave the studio so that you're not trying to email or text or something later, and the communication is a little bit more difficult. Ask before you leave or as soon as you think of them. And if you want, you can always start a list. I've had plenty of students do this for me. Start a list of questions that they're going to come to their next lesson with. That's always fun, but that's great because I want to know what they don't know. I want to know what it is that is concerning them and where there might be holes that I didn't suspect in their knowledge. Little gaps that we need to fill in. A couple other things go along with this that aren't necessarily about asking questions, but are part of your responsibility to communicate to your teacher. Remember to be honest about your practice time. Not just how much you practiced during the week, but how much you realistically expect to be able to practice in a given week. You know, it's the kind of thing where you can say, you know, this sounds like a great plan, but I really only have 45 minutes a day to practice. Okay, then your teacher can reset expectations. And this is so important because it prevents you from coming to a lesson without having been able to meet expectations that you had no way of meeting because you didn't have the practice time available to do it. And if you usually get two hours a day of practice, but you've got a week coming up where you're going to have three days, you can't practice at all. Be upfront about that ahead of time, too. Say, oh, you know, wait, this is the week I'm going to be gone three days for jury duty. I don't know what it is, but, you know, I'm going to be gone three days and I'm not going to be able to practice. So the teacher says, all right, well, then instead of adding page four, let's just go to the bottom of page three. And, you know, you should have enough practice time to do that. Do you think that'll fit in? And then you get the chance to say yes or no. So you want to be honest about the practice time you have for the week that's coming up. And also, of course, for the amount of practice that you actually put in the week before. It's very helpful for us because then we know if there's a. If there's a holdup, is there something that isn't working right? If you're making progress more slowly than we expected? Is it because there's something you don't Understand? Or is it maybe just a lack of practice time? So that's something that we need to be informed about. Another helpful tip, write your lesson notes before you leave the lesson so that you can be sure that you don't forget anything that your teacher said. And B, so that you can be very clear about any instruction that you've been given. So, you know, it's helpful to sort of take those notes and say, all right, so with this piece, I'm going to start at letter A and I'm going to do this hand separately. I'm going to do this so that I can do this. I'm going to try speeding up this way. I'm going to do this, this, this, and that will clear up confusion before it starts. What a great idea, right? Always ask or be sure you understand how to practice something, you know, so that if your teacher just says, oh, go home and let's, you know, you can go ahead and you go home and fix that. If you need more direction, if you need more information about how to do that, just ask. If your teacher says, you know, go home and fix this, can then you get to say, well, and how would you suggest I fix it? What should I be doing to do that? So always ask for the how. Don't just be satisfied with an answer. That's okay. Well, you know, learn pages five and six for next time, if that makes sense to you. If you feel like you know how to do that, terrific. But if you have a question, you say, you know, I, I took a look at pages five and six, and I don't understand the rhythm there. Could you help me with that before I go? I mean, just think how much practice time that will save you. You won't have to relearn anything. What a great bonus. One last thing. The teacher student dynamic can be kind of a challenging one. It's a very close relationship. You're working very closely together, and you may be friends with your teacher totally aside from the harp. But remember that in that studio, it's your teacher's job to push you and to challenge you, which is not necessarily exactly what every friend does, or at least not in the same way that a friend in just a social situation would do that. Pushing and that challenging is part of their job as your teacher. Now, it's also their job, of course, to treat that relationship kindly and to offer that advice with respect. But they need to push you. That's what they're there for. And that's the advice and the information and the instruction that you want. So you need to be very careful with each other to maintain the boundaries of the social relationship and the teacher student relationship and keep those separate. Obviously, they will intermingle. We're people. But be very aware that when you are sitting on that heart bench, you are there to learn. And that puts your friend, your teacher in. In a different role. So that's just something to be aware of. As you work with your teacher, you want to be able to maintain that clarity in your own mind, whether you're the teacher or the student, about what your role is at any given moment. And remember to honor the other person in the midst of all of that struggle. I hope you enjoyed just chatting about these aspects of the teacher student dynamic today. It's a challenging one. Whether you're the student student or whether you're the teacher. Learning is challenging. Teaching is challenging. And they are both such important roles. So whichever side of the fence you're on at any given moment, and many of us are on both sides, sometimes a student, sometimes a teacher, just remember that you are contributing to the sum of harp happiness in the world. And that is a wonderful thing. So next week on the show, we're talking about something entirely different. And it's this. Think about all those things that you do and you practice and you practice and you think, gosh, I've really gotten it. And then there's something else that shows up in your piece. Sometimes I call these potholes, these mistakes that, gosh, I thought I had this learned. Sometimes it's just another learning dimension. But I want you to think about this sentence because this is what we're talking about next week. Just because there's more to fix doesn't mean you're not making progress. Okay, you got that one. Mull that one over this week. Just because there's more to fix doesn't mean you're not making progress. So we'll talk about that here on the podcast next week. Don't forget, if you are a harp teacher, I would love to work with you and chat with you and trade secrets with you at our teacher retreat in October. Please check that out. It's going to be a wonderful opportunity to be among your peers and learn and grow a little bit together and create connection with some of the other wonderful harp teachers that are here in our community. Until then, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit, and all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp happiness every day. See you next time.