Why slow is often faster

I had a student, a teenager, who was already rounding off one piece while I was still explaining it. Quick to grasp things, enthusiastic, never reluctant. Yet after six months he got stuck. Not on a difficult piece, but on something fundamental: he could no longer play the things he already “knew” reliably under pressure. He had moved on too fast. Too little had been allowed to settle.

I see that pattern more often than I’d like. Not only with quick learners. With myself as a teacher too, in the years when I still thought lesson time was primarily about covering material.

Going slowly feels like losing. As though you’re shortchanging the student if you stay on the same thing too long. Parents sometimes ask how far things have progressed. The child wants something new too, because new feels like growing. And honestly, I want to see progress myself — that’s the proof I’m doing something right.

But progress isn’t distance. It’s grip.

What I mean is: a passage someone can play with 60% confidence yields less than a passage they command with 95% confidence. Not because certainty is beautiful in itself, but because high reliability is the foundation everything else gets built on. A shaky foundation gives a shaky upper floor, however impressive it may look.

What’s striking is that students I deliberately slow down — who I really let a passage settle before we move on — end up going faster than the others. Not because they work harder, but because they need fewer repetitions at the next level. They don’t have to go back.

There’s also something psychological in it. A student who knows something for certain walks into a lesson differently than one who is hoping it’ll be okay. Certainty creates space. Space makes you curious. And of all the things I can cultivate in a lesson, curiosity is the most durable.

Still, it remains hard to hold yourself back. There’s a moment in almost every lesson when I feel I could introduce something new. The student plays it well, the energy is there — now then, I used to think. These days I sometimes wait deliberately for another minute. Let them play it one more time. Check whether it holds without me standing next to it. Because “it’ll be fine” is different from “it’s there.”

Going slowly also asks something of the communication with parents and students. I try to shift the conversation from “what have we covered” to “what can we really do now.” Those two questions give very different answers. And only the second one says anything about whether music is being made, or whether material has merely been passed through.

There was a teacher who once said to me: “Everything you skip, you take with you.” I didn’t fully understand it then. I understand it a little better every week.

But I sometimes wonder: when is slow truly slow, and when is it simply the right tempo? And who decides that — the teacher, the student, or the piece itself?