Why teaching less often means learning more
Covering less doesn't mean learning less.
I remember a lesson with a boy of about twelve. We had been working on the same bassline for three weeks — a simple rhythm, four bars, nothing special. He could play it. But the moment I played a chord on top of it, he lost it. Every single time. I thought: he doesn’t really have it yet. We stayed with it.
His mother asked me after that period whether we couldn’t start something new. She had the feeling we were standing still.
I understand that feeling. From the outside, repetition looks like stagnation. But what actually happened during those three weeks was that he was learning to hold the rhythm while his attention was somewhere else. That is different from being able to play the rhythm. That is having the rhythm.
In teaching there is always pressure to move on. Students want something new. Parents want to see progress. And I don’t want to come across as boring either. But I have gradually become convinced that this pressure is the biggest brake on real development.
Every new piece, every new technique costs attention. Attention a student only has once. If I keep dividing that attention across new material, there is never enough of it for the things that truly sink in. The result is a student who has touched many things but owns very few of them.
There is a moment in the learning process that is invisible, but I have come to love it: the moment when something stops being actively thought about and starts happening automatically. When someone first learns a chord change, they count. Later they don’t count anymore. That difference is exactly the difference between knowing and being able to do.
Repetition is the road from knowing to doing. But repetition feels like standing still, and that makes it hard to sell.
What I have started doing in recent years is being more honest about why we are repeating something. Not: “we’re doing it again because it wasn’t perfect yet”, but: “you can already play it — we’re repeating it so you can play it while thinking about something else.” That is a different goal. A goal the student can also feel for themselves when it has been reached.
The boy with the bassline eventually didn’t have to think about it anymore. He was just playing it while looking at me. That was the moment. After that we moved on.
There is also something in how we put lesson material together. The tendency is to fill a lesson completely. Technique, a new piece, theory, maybe some ear training. It feels thorough. But a student who takes home twelve new things goes home with twelve half-things. Taking home one thing properly is worth more.
These days I more often start a lesson by asking myself: what must genuinely stick after this lesson? Sometimes the answer is just one sentence. And if that one thing has stuck after forty minutes, the lesson was a success, even if it didn’t feel full.
The hardest part is staying consistent with this when a student gets impatient. Or a parent does. Or when I feel myself that I haven’t done enough. But a student who truly masters one thing will learn the next ten faster than a student who half-knows twenty. The investment is at the beginning, not at the end.
That is not something I always knew. It is something I had to learn by seeing what happened when I moved on too quickly.
I sometimes wonder what students actually remember from their lessons after a year. Not the pieces they played, but the things that truly stayed with them. How long is that list really — and is what is on it the result of slowing down, or of speed?
A student who truly masters one thing will learn the next ten faster than a student who half-knows twenty.