5 | How To Take A Lesson

Welcome to the Mic Drop Podcast, episode five, how to take a lesson. Okay, hi there, everyone. This is Mike Tee and I'm joined by Mike Cee and we are together, Mic Drop. This is the Mic Drop Duo Podcast. You are in the right place, congratulations. And today we are going to be discussing how to take a lesson. Mike, I know you've taken a lot of lessons in your life. Yeah, I have. But in true professor fashion, I have something I'd like to talk about before, before I even start. We haven't started. I know we haven't started. We haven't started, but I would like to talk about this because the last time we talked, we talked about productivity, technology, and I had sort of three thoughts on that. Okay. One is that I was kind of struck about how we both, in the spirit of trying to take a lesson, we both kind of took lessons from each other about this technology thing because pretty soon after you wrote me about one of the technologies I mentioned, and then pretty soon after, I wrote down a whole bunch of stuff on a sheet of paper, analog. I wrote down my three ideas, which I'm showing you now, on a sheet of paper in a notebook. So I thought that was kind of a cool thing about how we can all, how we can all be listening. Number two, one other thought I had is that almost everything we talked about in this tech tools, if you're watching or listening to this out of order, I hope you're not watching it. But if you're listening to it out of order, we talked about one between one and five tech tools that we use, and we ended up talking about both zero and about a thousand. And I was thinking that almost everything we talked about is kind of a way of doing alone what you might do in a team of people. Would you agree or disagree with that? It's kind of turning yourself into multiple people. Yeah, I totally agree with that. The one thing I've been thinking about the past few days is how, if you are the CEO of like a finance company or a hedge fund or something, then you have a team of people working with you so that you can not deal with the mundane day to day tasks, but just focus on the big picture items in the direction of the company. So they take care of the scheduling and the managing of your, maybe email accounts and other things so that you can focus. And that takes, it really takes a village to make that happen. And yeah, without a team of assistants, technology can do the work. Yeah, you know, actually that, that resonates a little bit because I'm fascinated with the people who research for fiction writers. I remember, I love the writer Elmore Leonard, and I remember reading an interview. He said, "My researcher did XYZ, and I remember as a ten-year-old, I thought, "What?" You didn't do that. And then a few years later, I was listening to Cartoc, and somebody called in to Cartoc, and they said, "I am a researcher for an author, and there's a scene in the book where two characters in the year 1936 drive between this city and this city. How long would it have taken them?" Whoa. Yeah. She went straight to the source. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And, I mean, to Russkin, I had researchers, everybody, there's no way you can, you can know. Frank Gary has a team of people working on his architectures. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was starting to think as you were talking because I wasn't listening to you. Oh, see. What would you have people research on your behalf? For me, it would be almost entirely minutia, and then I would be having people doing things for me that are incredibly important. So there's nothing in between. So I would have people looking up like, why is that painting, why is the frame that color or who put that manhole cover there? Or what year did people first start cutting marble or something like that? Okay. Because that tells me a little bit that maybe you want to know this information, but the journey to get the information isn't necessarily what you need in that moment. No, I want to know. I want to know. Yeah. Because I would rather focus on what is that all combined, which brings me to my third point, which is that we were, today we're going to talk about lessons, which kind of means we're going to talk about how to learn. I hope, I hope we talk about that. And I like to learn by kind of combining ideas in my head from different places. And I, in the recent weeks, I've been to a lot of museums. I love going to museums. And today I went to an archaeology museum and I went to the history, a history museum. So I went to the history of Madrid museum and I went to the Spanish, Spanish national archaeological museum. And it struck me. I love how different cultures organize information because we were sort of talking about organizing information. So the history of the Madrid museum is full of maps, historical maps, which is totally like clickbait for me or catnip or something. And then I loved, I loved taking a look at these ancient Egyptian tombs, which include on the like maps of how to get to the afterlife, but also all sorts of information. And it just got me thinking about how, how we organize information is kind of like, is kind of culturally determined to some extent. And also it can be really hard to read if you're not a member of that culture. And I have, I have no action item with that. I just thought it was kind of, was kind of cool. Okay. I'm, I'm closing my notebook and throwing it behind me so we can actually get to the topic of the podcast. Well, that's amazing. And, uh, yeah, wow, what a, what a great, uh, what a great thought there. I mean, so we've done, yeah, we've done how we've done that. Yeah. Really, it's a, it's a way of, uh, of kind of teaching yourself, right? Like these museums are, are, it's just a wealth of knowledge, the way that a library could be. And, you know, that was like Einstein's famous thing was that he just really didn't connect with the structured school program and he taught himself almost everything in the libraries. Yeah. And, and to be honest, when we're going to talk about lessons, when we are speaking about lessons, which I hope is right now, um, the, the, the, the art of taking a lesson is as much about you learning how to teach yourself as it is from, cleaning information from someone else, because taking and learning from somebody else or from something else really involves that, uh, translational moment, right? Where you take somebody else's idea and then you combine it with your perceptions to create a new idea and then you find some way of like re, re articulating or restructuring that idea. So, um, in anticipation of your sort of deep, whatever deep question you were going to ask today, which is like, what is a lesson? Yes. Um, what is music? I thought I would cut the, cut you off at the pass here. Well, uh, yeah, because I, I think that just to frame what we're going to talk about, I think there's a lot of, uh, a lot of discussion about how we teach a lesson. And I think it's something that a lot of people care about. And at the end of every semester, I know we get, uh, student statements that are comments on our teaching. Um, and it really matters a lot, uh, you know, to hear those, those comments. And we, we talked to each other about how to, how to teach a lesson, how to structure a lesson, what kind of materials, what kind of curricula are we using? And, uh, but we, we don't really think, or at least I didn't really think as a student that there was a skill to actually taking a lesson. And these are skills that supersede a specific teacher. Yeah. This isn't how to study with Mike, um, C or T, like this, this is not a how to guide. But I feel like when we're discussing things, we're talking about the empirical student studying with what I'm going to assume is the most difficult teacher because it's easy to study with somebody with whom you connect immediately and you just have a flow. Um, that, that way you, uh, you, you really don't have to worry about too many things and maybe you don't have to worry about your skills or techniques, but these are for, uh, students that maybe feel like they may not be getting as much out of their lesson or they could be getting more or there are some maybe sticking points with a teacher or something. I, I wanted to structure my thoughts that are not geared towards how a teacher can teach better for you, the student, but how us, the student can maximize the experience of a lesson. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I mean, I'm lucky to teach at a public university and, um, I find, you know, just in general, there are some things that, that maybe some musicians consider self evident that we actually need to talk about. Yeah. What do you need to do to show up at a rehearsal? What do you need to do to take a lesson? What do you need to do to communicate with people? I'm not sure about you, but I actually, I had a moment where somebody said, I'm gonna teach you how to take a lesson. I was in high school and I had an incredible teacher, Norm Weinberg and I came into a lesson and he said, okay, you know, he had a little sheet that he'd fill out for each week, that he would give to me and I would give back to him. And he said, okay, I'm gonna, you're not sounding very good. So come back at this time and we're gonna spend three hours and I'm gonna teach you how to practice and to take a lesson. And I found that probably the most helpful single lesson I'd ever had in my life. - Yeah, a lesson on lessening. - Yeah, the medal lesson. - Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I mean, to be honest, I learned as much about taking lessons from classes I've taken. - Okay. - Because in the class, you have no choice, but to follow the teacher in a lecture class in the way that they do it. So you have to really come to grips with how you're learning. - Right, and it's only in a class setting, it's not one-on-one, there's one way of presenting material. And the teacher has that, like, you know, an enviable job of trying to frame a lecture for every single person in that room simultaneously. - Yeah. - And I know we could get into an argument about various learning styles. I think there's a thought out there that, well, I'm a visual learner, and I'm an oral learner. And I think there's been studies that say that that actually doesn't exist. - Yeah, I would agree. - But nonetheless, so here's how the true style mind would jump right in. I am going to just say, like, I don't have to say what is a lesson. I mean, some of us have taken a lesson. Maybe there's people out there who've never taken a music private lesson before. There's probably some talk in the administrative world of higher education about the value of a one-on-one class, you know, financially. But it is a part of our culture. It's for any Nazim accredited school. It's a required part. And for me, I was thinking about, well, you know, what is the lesson and not necessarily a dictionary definition, but for me, it's a dedicated time with me, the student and my teacher. And it's a performance opportunity. I think this is a frame that a lot of students don't understand. I think sometimes they feel like that lesson is a passive relationship, that lesson. And they go in and are expecting information. Whereas I feel like I did my best work as a student when I felt like it was an opportunity for me to practice performing for an audience of one, a very critical audience. And then I also was able to, out of these lessons or I feel like the lesson is an opportunity for you to gain strategies and tools for you to self-teach because inevitably, by definition, you have a one-hour lesson every week with your teacher. And that is the extent of your personal contact with that teacher usually. - Yeah. - Which means that 24 hours times six days plus the other 23 hours of your lesson day are spent with you expected to structure yourself. This is in a sports team where you have a structured workout with the fitness coach for four hours and then you have a strategy meeting with the assistant coach and you're always unstructured time. It's mostly unstructured time. So the lesson is the fuel that allows you strategies to help yourself self-teach for the remainder of the week. What else Mike, what did I forget? - I love it. - What did I forget there? Did I forget anything with the, what a lesson could be? - Oh, I guess I would just say that there's an art to taking a lesson, like you said. And the thing that stuck out to me that resonates with me is that your learning is your responsibility. And the sooner you can work on that or make that a priority, the sooner you kind of professionalize yourself as a musician. - Yeah. - One thing I would add is like, do you need lessons to improve? - No, maybe not. I mean, yes, you need feedback. And I think there are three kinds of feedbacks, self, peer and like teacher or somebody expert. And expert feedback, you probably have access to the least as a musician. Would you agree with that? That's what you said about 99% of the time you're alone. And so it's your sort of job or it's your goal to maximize that feedback. And I think everything else that you do to prepare for the lesson before, during and after the lesson is about maximizing that feedback. - Oh yeah. - Not to say that the teacher's feedback is full proof, bullet proof, perfect, but it's feedback. And feedback is inherently valuable, I think. - Yeah. So I don't know, what do you think, where do you think we should start? If you walk into a lesson, maybe the easiest place to start is what are those things? Like what should I be holding when I walk into a lesson? - I like that you always start with objects and I'm starting with simple ideas. So I think I took this from you, but we were both thinking about the lesson in terms of before, during and after. - Yeah. - And so are we talking about the during or the before right now? Well, maybe during, can we go during in non-chronological, what do you think? - Yes, yes. I noticed you wrote down on your outline, which I have the opportunity to see, what does the teacher do and what does the student do? So maybe we start with that. I'd love to hear your ideas about this. - Great, yeah, so the, like I think in that lesson, essentially defining roles for me is really helpful because then we have like an idea of what am I expected to do as a student, right? And what can I expect from that faculty member? I think there's like the extreme of the student who would walk in and say teach me, right? And then like, oh, I'm bringing nothing to this table. You are the teacher. I am the pupil here, tell me about this. And in some ways, it's like an eye role for a lot of private lesson teachers because it means that that student didn't put any work in that week. And they still want to extract information without bringing anything to the table. - So yeah, I would call that intrinsic motivation. - Yeah, possibly. - And I remember once Jason Haheim, the timpannist of the Met, opera orchestra gave a class at one of the schools I was teaching at and he said, bring your teacher problems to solve, not mysteries to diagnose. (laughing) You know what I mean? - Sort of like that sort of, I have no idea what it is. - That's interesting because I actually approach teaching in a very different way than that. - Okay, let's know. - And I might maybe we'll get into that in a little bit. Okay, okay. So we talked about what is the student bring in terms of a mindset? - Yeah, well, I think-- - What's the role of the student? - Yeah, so I think the student's job is to over-prepare. - For a lesson. And something that you have maybe hinted at before but I'll be pretty clear about right now is that I felt like I was doing my best work as a student when I was using my breaks a Q previous episode. I was using my summer-- - What is summer? (laughing) - How do I sit? - I was using my breaks to prepare lesson material in advance so that I could have my lesson in that first week of classes be, I would maybe be four to eight weeks ahead of my lesson material. So I was able to practice for eight weeks, essentially over the summer of material because I could condense the time and then I was able to work on larger projects. So I could bring in all of the Beethoven symphonies for a lesson and then I could bring in Merlin the next week. And this isn't because I'm a very fast, amazing music learner, it's because I had eight weeks to prepare or six weeks to prepare. So I felt like over-preparing for a lesson and that could mean starting your lesson material quite a bit earlier, but also in the Mike Compatelo method. Like really dive into the who, what, where, when, why of all this music? So I think that's like the primary job of the student. Wow. What do you think? Do you feel, do you feel similarly? I do feel similarly, and maybe I'm a bad student, but one of our, we sort of titled this internally tips for taking a great lesson, so maybe I can offer some tips to that point. Sure. So one thing a student, you can, as a student, you can watch out for what, what is the teacher, what do you, we think the teacher's job is and keep up, keep a look up for these things and keep track of them. So for me, the teacher can and should create a pyramid of fundamentals and kind of hierarchy of important stuff in the piece of music. The teacher should be facilitating your mental representation, your sense of what an instrument should sound like, either by demonstrating or getting you to demonstrate or listening to a recording. So if you're a student, you should watch out for those things. The, you know, I, my, my teacher, Bob Van Seiss, would say that in every lesson he would try to give you three pieces of information about the piece he were working on and one piece about music in general. So I would say as a student, during the lesson, you should be watching out for those things. So during the lesson for the student, just for some concrete tips, since I, I don't, I don't want to talk too much, the student, I know we'll talk about these. Some, some ideas, bring the music to the lesson, bring stuff to write down things in the music or in the notebook, record the lesson, and then pay attention to the way in which your teacher demonstrates things. I don't want to say your teacher is, is a deity or something like that, but I do want to say that they're an important, even if you don't agree with them, having the ability to observe someone else doing the thing you are aspiring to do, it can be pretty helpful. And then I would say the other thing, a tip is to just be prepared in a great lesson for a significant dip in your performance quality as you develop the skill. Yeah. You shouldn't sound great for the whole lesson, I think, don't you think? It's okay to not sound amazing, but I think part of the preparing for the lesson is, what could my teacher possibly tell me that would derail me enough where I don't sound, I can't get through this. What would you say? Would you add any sort of tiny tips? I think we're getting great talking about the big picture stuff, motivation, things like that, but you seem to be great at coming up with things that I would not have thought about that are actually fundamental to the experience. Well, I think one thing, just to qualify the recording device, I'm going to underline that, emphasize it, cut it out, highlight it, circle it, like having a record of the lesson is very important. And you know, something that we were alluding to earlier, I think that there is a post-lesson routine that's so critical that involves immediately after the lesson, writing down scribble, frantic, everything you can possibly remember from that lesson, from specific tips, to exercises that were offered, even if you have recorded it, just as much as you can get down in the moment, and then going back later that night or maybe early the next morning and actually transcribing the entire lesson and its entirety is really helpful. However, there are teachers that don't allow you to record, so I think it's really important to ask before you just assume that the recording is OK, and then after you've gotten the approval, it's OK, if you haven't gotten the approval, I think it might change the way that you take that lesson, so you might have to make the choice then whether am I going to write this down in the moment or am I going to try to be as present as possible and then remember as much as possible afterwards. So that's a recording device, a qualifier, and then the other thing I might add is having the ability to change your sound on a dime with a teacher's request based on their experience requires that you have as many possibilities of mallet sounds as possible, so that's a great idea. Bring in the kitchen sink to your lesson. I really, this happens so much, it's in my locker. It's, right, oh, I think I have that, but it's in my room, well, then we're not going to be able to get to that today, and that's unfortunate because there is a chance that that thing might not be gotten to for the rest of your time in undergrad, and this was your opportunity, and that's just unfortunate. So there's a certain limit to things like if you're playing a marimba solo, maybe you don't need all of your triangle beaters. But this would happen to me in my lessons where I'd be playing a marimba solo in my teacher would say, I think we need to work on this kind of sound. Let's play it on some timpani, and let's go over there right now, and imagine I didn't have a pair of timpani mallets. I would have missed something that might have been a really profound moment. So, yes, absolutely. So I think that I don't really have much else besides your list of what you physically need to bring to your lesson, but I would bring contingencies like it's not, you're not sitting there just playing one, you're not playing one piece one way. It's not a concert performance, even though it is a performance opportunity. So have your agenda of, I am going to come in, I've made the decision on these mallets, I will start with these, and then allow for the change, be prepared for the change. Yeah, no, I totally agree, and as I've studied more and more about how humans acquire new skills, it's sort of interesting how some of those ideas are exactly what music teachers would say to do, and some of them sort of aren't to some extent, but what you said a couple of things really stand out that I think are biologically really important. Our memory gets exponentially worse in the first 24 hours of something. To the point where studies have shown that people can, our memory is so malleable on purpose that we can misremember things, right, like oh, I thought that thing was red. So I would say that my post-lesson or post-learning anything experiences two phases, on the one hand, I want to use my immediate memory to write down the important things, my markum and the music. What I would do for lessons is go through the music I had played and then try to remember what we talked about in each bar, and I actually was a terrible student because I would be writing stuff down during the lesson. I would tell my teacher, hold on, hold on, hold on, I would scribble it down. And then after the lesson, this idea of reviewing the lesson, recording, transcribing it, I'd like to make an outline of the lesson to sort of see hierarchically, because then I got information for when I was lucky to get to teach of how did this teacher structure that time? Oh, yeah. So that was like a side piece of information that was unrelated to when I learned in the lesson, but it was sort of how much time did we spend on this idea before we went on? How much time did we spend working on this thing? And I find that personally fascinating. Sure. And that's also a helpful tool for you as a teacher now to have that data. Yeah, I mean, because to some extent, as musicians, we don't study didactics. We don't study learn, we don't have study teaching, you know, like we're professors, but we were never trained to teach, maybe don't publicly say that, but so our knowledge about teaching is limited to what we have acquired, what we have experienced, and what we've been lucky enough to research. So having the opportunity to sort of see how people learn, so I loved learning about how like teachers in seminars in college would structure the time when they would ask for feedback from me, when they would ask things, because you know, great teaching to some extent is intuitive, but intuition is usually based on some kind of framework, right? So there's that, and then the other thing I would add is in the lesson, have practiced the things you did at previous lessons, because there's nothing more frustrating than to hear the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, right, and think like when is this person going to stop telling me this, how about when you figure it out, or when you acquire it, yeah? Amazingly, music is cumulative, even if the course is not, that's a good point, yeah. Unfortunate, sorry. So yeah, well, we're kind of talking about the, like in the middle of the lesson, like in the lesson things, and one thing I think that's critical for any student's success in the lesson is obviously trying to extract information. build tools that that's basically like the point of these lessons to be able to help you teach yourself when the teacher is not around. But also I think there's an element of like a mentality going into a lesson that's really critical and it's it I don't think that a combative approach is always helpful for building those tools. And I don't think a I am right and my teacher is trying to do something terrible to me approach is always the best option. I always think about the the improvisation mentality of yes and like when you're doing some kind of like stage improvisation like who's line is it anyway type thing. If somebody brings something up as an improvisation then the best thing to do is to accept that as reality and and then after you've accepted that reality that the person has offered you then take that and run with it or take that and use that to your advantage in the rest of the improvisation. So having a student mentality of walking in saying yes and I think is a really helpful thing. Yeah I agree and one one thing maybe we don't explicitly say enough is that it's it's it's physically really really helpful to hear conflicting viewpoints because combining and articulating and thinking analytically and synthesizing different people's viewpoints is essential to learning how to do something. And so the sort of extension or the child of that idea is that I don't think in a learning environment it's not helpful to immediately disagree with somebody. You know what I mean it's helpful to allow that person to articulate their whole thought or articulate their whole paradigm and then maybe later when you're at home you go eh maybe I don't need an 80-inch triangle or something like that you know. But is there a way that a student in the moment if you feel like oh wow this person is really saying something that's conflicting from let's say you've taken a lesson like you're a graduate student and you've taken four years of lessons and that person says well all all triangles should be played with yarn mallets and then you come to a graduate program in another place and they say we'd like you to use a triangle beater and what's the your paradigm shift is so strong it what's the what's the best way to do that do you just say okay in the moment and then or would you and then try to figure something out later or in that moment is there a way to address that and start the conversation well I'll I have a very strong personal answer which but it's prefaced by it can it can really only happen in a moment of comfort or a moment where you feel safe and sometimes you know people in their lessons don't necessarily feel personally safe but my my thought would be we're in a sort of swing away from dogma right now in 2023 as percussionist right used to be the way people taught percussion and classical music was dogmatic here's the way within this system to do it here's the you know here's the the French way of doing this well here's the Cleveland style way of doing something so what would I found and the lessons that I've taken and the lessons that I'm giving is that when somebody asks you could you flesh that out a little bit or could you help me could explain why why you might do that the the teacher's answer to why is usually really really really eliminating it will either give you incredible confidence in this person or it will cause you to change some idea or it will give you a new idea about something else or you'll end up totally you'll end up totally disagreeing but I would say disagree met is actually a terrible mindset to take when you're first learning something I think disagreement is the provenance of people who have have read the whole book so anyway what I would say is so that's just a sidebar soap box but but I would say the best the best lessons I have ever given are when someone asks you when I say like oh start this what maybe let's try starting with your right hand and someone will say well I was always taught to do this why why would you do that and because then that opens the door to saying oh let's talk about a whole category of things because this sidebar to the sidebar the skills of being a great performer are not the same skills of being a great teacher the skills of green great performer are to come up with a ton of options for something but if you're in a lesson teaching lesson to someone maybe you shouldn't say 50 ways to do this thing maybe you should say let's try this one right now yeah but sometimes as a student you can you can actually get an incredible piece of information from a teacher that they would have thought was self-evident you know they they would have thought well I thought everybody knew that and then you know someone you know I've had that with like simple playing where somebody would say you don't hear that harmony you don't hear that start that harmonic right and then after a few minutes I go I do hear that that changes everything the analogy I think of is the if you're listening to NPR and you start to hear the announcer's breath yeah then that's everything you can hear you can't hear anything else so that that's how how I would ask my students to bring it up and I hope that a teacher like me has the humility to to take it on I mean something my dad used to say he was a professor was you have to teach the students you have not the ones you wish you had oh that's and and so that's a way to be present in the moment to to articulate some ideas to together so as a student I would say that's that's that's a way to do it I'm sure there are a ton of other ways like another way to do it would be to take the lesson and nod and then go home and spend a lot of time looking something up like or trying it out going you know I wrote this blog post a little while ago and I said one thing I said about after the lesson is try the stuff that you were being asked to do yeah make it and then make it into something yeah at least try it if you say I don't like durian the fruit are you sure like have you tried it in all the contexts yeah yeah yeah I mean this happens a lot for me in like do the clues snare drum A-tudes I do a lot of double strokes and usually my students look at me really a scans they're like what is hell is this guy doing and then you know they might come back a week later and go oh yeah that does kind of work sure so I'm yeah and I might add one thing to that I feel if I want to be consistent with my yes and mentality I think if if I were taking a lesson and somebody said something conflicting to what I'm doing so in your situation if you said hey why don't you start that in your right hand and you can do a double and I think in my head I've gone through this I've tried the double the double is not right for me it's not what I want to express in this piece I'm going to I'm going to maybe say absolutely I'm happy to do that right now but after I'm done I got a question for you about that and then and then do the thing and try try your best I mean I'm thinking about that amazing video of Buddy Rich explaining why matched grip is terrible yeah you see this the yeah yeah where he's he's explaining to a reporter of some kind that like I play traditional grip and listen to how terrible match grip sounds it's it's giving giving OJ the glove right like you can't you know he's just showing you oh I'm just gonna throw the throw the game here I'm gonna play some terrible things with match grip but check out what I can do with traditional and then he turns it on you know it's the same thing like if a students given a piece of information and then tries to prove to the teacher why that information is terrible as opposed to let me try to make the most beautiful phrase I can out of this information and preface that with hey I've got a question after this so just to alert the teacher I if we can not move on after this I'd love to qualify that like hey you know I tried this out I didn't feel like it had enough phrase what what's your thinking behind that I think that really helps me as a teacher have a little bit of confidence in that student like giving it they're all and then realizing that they're a thinking student and then coming back and being able to to share my side also because you know the though the student might think well I'm just getting berated with information from my teacher really it's very much a dialogue and the Students contribution 90% of their contribution. contribution is the thesis of their performance. I have made my choices, I've made my decisions, and I'm not going to tell you in words, I'm going to play my decisions for you. And then you're going to evaluate those decisions. So I feel like when you do speak just being really clear and getting some opinions from the teacher could be very helpful. Wow, I want to study with you. And vice versa. I was so scared that we would show up today and you would say, okay, the title of our episode is called Tips, so I want some concrete tips. So I did come up with some concrete tips because usually my outlines are like, what did Herodotus say about lessons? It's a lot of questions. Let me tell you. Oh my God. But I have two tips that sort of go along with what you said. One is to sort of think one level up. This is something I talk about a lot with my students. One level up thinking, like, what's the importance of this? Or what could you take this to in parallel situations? Or sort of what's the thinking behind this? Not just sort of do this, like the double strokes as an example. Not just, I'll play double strokes, but sort of, well, what's one level above that? So that's one tip. The other, because when you think that way, you apply things to parallel moments and pieces. Right. Like what is the next level up? If you say double strokes for this part, what is next? Well, you could go one or two or three or four levels up. One obvious next level up to me is, well, what is sticking due to phrasing as a percussionist? And then the level up beyond that is sort of, why would you choose that phrase? Maybe. So that's something like that. I mean, I think a lot of the students that I work with, especially undergrads, they haven't really thought, some of them haven't really thought about, well, sticking isn't just a requirement. Like I'm doing it this way. But it's actually, it's free. You know, you can do something. You could play everything with your left hand if you wanted. The, the other tip, tip number two is, is what if as the student, you pretend to up the stakes? Before we started recording, or maybe while we were recording, we were talking about like athletes and they amount the money they make per second. Yes. Imagine that you were paying eight million dollars for the lesson. What would you do? I like to think about this with gigs too. Imagine someone said, you called me and said, can you come play Bartok Sinada? I will pay you 20 million dollars. Right. I would probably prepare. That's right. Do well to the maximum of my ability. So imagine that you were paying that. What would you expect? Or what would you do to get, quote, your money's worth? Yep. From it. I mean, maybe that's kind of a mean thing to say. But if you up the stakes in some way, it doesn't need to be money. It could be, it could be like a community. It could be a concert that touches people's lives. If you flew to Tokyo from Phoenix, and you had a one hour lesson and you were flying 17 hours to take that one hour lesson or that audition, then yeah, you definitely show up ready to go. Yeah. And like I hesitate to say this kind of stuff because when you're a student, you're not in control of your time. Right. But I would say if you really are investing in yourself, think about the moments before the lesson. Am I going to be running there from a class? Am I going to be showing up, you know, have come from marching band and my skin looks like a hot dog? And I mean, I actually really appreciate it. Shout out to my students. If I haven't done this, please tell me. But when someone says, okay, you scheduled me at 2 p.m. But I have a class till 150. Yeah. I love hearing that because I think something, if I were taking lessons every week, I would want to have like two hours before the lesson to be getting ready for this lesson so that when I show up, I know the problems I have are overarching problems. They're not acute. They're not like, oh, I could play that before, but I just can't right now. So I think that's another, another tip. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm illustrating the worst kind of teaching, which is hunt and peck. You know, like a bad teacher just points out little things, but a great teacher ties them together into a thesis. Right. And I think as a student, the one level up is what's the thesis of the lesson? Yeah. Even if the teacher doesn't, sometimes I don't know at the beginning of the lesson as a teacher, I don't know what my thesis is. And then by the end of the lesson, I will have made a tremendous amount of points. And, and then sometimes I'll connect them for the student. And sometimes I don't know what the connection is, but somebody who records the lesson and listens back can realize, you know, there's a lot of thoughts about body posture. There's a lot of thoughts about phrasing. There's a lot of thoughts about connecting line or sound or whatever that thing is. And you realize that the more votes you have by your teacher, even if you feel like your teacher is hunting and pecking, they are a human with a brain that makes connections subconsciously. And they are not just hunting and pecking. Even if they think they are, they're not. And the, the, the thing I would add is that even if a teacher is incredibly consistent with what they say, that's something you can take away. I mean, at Arizona State University, where I teach a few years ago, we hired another percussion teacher, this guy Matt, Prendergast. Hi, Matt. And he is really focused on sound quality. So when I talk to the students like, how are things going with Matt? He'll say, the students will say, every time I play, he says, you don't sound good. Or you don't, you know, your sounds not great. And I think, well, that's a pretty strong thesis, right? Whenever you play his thesis is that it's compelling. And people will play with you and follow you if you sound good. Yeah. And what good means, of course, is malleable, right? You know, for those of us in contemporary music, maybe we don't talk about that as much. We talk about like, you know, what are the tips you need to put the woodblock under the cowbell? I think, you know, that's a, that's a thesis. And, and sometimes it's a mark of a great lesson. We're at the end. You do like what, what my teacher Bob would say. Okay, here's the thing that we worked on at the end. But even if the teacher doesn't do that, just to reiterate what you said in a less articulate way, you can do it. Yep. Right? Like, you can go, I think about it, like going to a grocery store in another country. Like, you go to a grocery store in France, there is a lot of yogurt. So you might say to yourself, maybe yogurt's important. And then you go to the next aisle, there's a lot of milk. And there's also a lot of cheese. You might say, maybe dairy things are kind of important here. That's a stupid example. But nobody is putting above the entrance to the grocery store. Check out the dairy stuff. Dairy is important here. Yeah. But by virtue, I mean, actually, they do say that because of their, their sort of by French rules. But let's just say that they didn't. And you would just know by the number of votes in the store for that thing. And then you can also think of, well, what's not there? You know, in something, and I think in a lesson, you can do the same thing. What's there? What's not there? That's an ethnographic technique, what we would call participant observation, a way to separate your, your emotions from something. This is getting kind of deep. But basically, the tip here is try to articulate the larger point, even if the teacher doesn't say it. Sure. And it's optimism, right? It's like assuming the way that if you get a new piece, I would analyze it with the, the same vigor that I would a Beethoven piece. And I would just assume this piece is genius. And I have to find the genius in the piece. And the same thing here, my teacher is brilliant. I mean, not the, you know what I mean? Like, I'm going to assume that my teacher is brilliant and that they are crafting this beautiful thing. And my job is to find the beauty in, and the, the arc. Yeah. I, I read this fantastic book by this author, Nancy Klein, and it was called Time to Think. Okay. More time to think. And I won't get too much into it, but essentially the book is about giving people space to articulate their thoughts without bringing your own ideas to it. And how that's a real gift. Right. The opposite of what we're doing right now. Yeah, shut up for a minute. No, but I would say that like, something that can help us as humans. And also as lesson takers is let, let the person finish the thought, assume that there's a thought there, instead of going, you know, I hate hamburgers, this person is talking about hamburgers, they must not know what they're doing. You know what I mean? Like, don't bring yourself to it. Yes. You know, you can bring yourself to it later. And this is really hard because what we ask our students to do is perform with their whole opinion itself, and then immediately stop doing that, be incredibly receptive to new information, and then perform again in the lesson, not thinking about those things. Sure. Well, performance is a, is a version of language in, in my opinion, like you, the way that my musical idol Glenn Gould would maybe not write about every piece that he played, but he had opinions and thoughts, and they were presented in a very logical and clear manner in his performances. Like he can show you the voice leading of something without explaining everything and words. So if you, it's like just a way of conversing, if you're, if you're fluent in those languages. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Okay. So in the spirit of tips, can I go through my bullet point list? Yeah, but I'm not going to listen. Yes, yes, of course, hang on, hang on, I'm, well, I have one final, one final tip that's like an add on tip. Yeah. The number one thing I ever learned about learning was humility. Yeah. Like you have to be open to an idea to learn an idea, right? Unless you're just, it's like beaten into you. Yep. But I think if you can be humble, that doesn't mean you need to be humble in your whole life. And a lot of times people that are great learners are not humble people. But just the idea of being some sliver of open, which is hard because you have to be vulnerable to an extent. Oh, sure. Yeah, especially to a conflicting idea, I think that's really difficult to not necessarily difficult in universities in the 21st century and in a time when our political economic discourse is so prickly to use a gentle term, it's hard to be open to other people. So anyway, sorry, time in tips. Okay, Truzel tips, what to do during the lesson? Here we go, time stamp it. Number one, be amazingly present in the lesson. So I think this goes with what we've said already, but being, having the time before the lesson to center yourself, be ready mentally and physically. And in that moment, be there with your teacher and hopefully they are there with you in order to help you improve your skills. Number two, ding, be professional. So the, that you take that for whatever it is, I think you have an idea in your head of what professional could be. And that could be anywhere from dressing up. If you, if you wanted to go that, that far, but honestly, like in a professional environment, there are certain things that I would wear and there's certain things that I would not wear. But I'm not going to dictate what my students necessarily wear to their lessons, but they, but professional in behavior, professional in the way that you accept ideas and the way that you behave. And that's a good practice for your professional life. How do you learn how to be professional? I don't know, but I feel like, like being in cultures where you see professionalism, you can start to pick up tips. And it's not like, I am professional now. I am not professional now. But you can see what a professional does. How does a professional present themselves? How do they handle adversity? How do they handle a joke? How do they handle levity? And how do they interact with people? There are probably some, like certain words that you would say with your friends, but not with your, in a professional environment. And I think that the, yeah, just seeing things and picking up tips and putting them on your, your wad of gum of knowledge are very helpful. Yeah, okay. The, as I said before, the yes and mentality, I don't want to be surprised by anything. I, I, I want to be able to have prepared everything and be willing to tackle any suggestion that's, that's given to me. I have a suggestion. Um, after the quotation mark, there should be an M dash, not a hyphen. Oh, are you looking at my document? I'm looking at your document. I'm cheating. Oh, that's okay. No, follow along. Um, okay, that's good to know. Thank you. Yeah. Is that, do I do two hyphens? Is that how it makes an M dash? I think on a Mac, it's, uh, option shift hyphen. Oh, I got an option shift. The option button is, is, has alluded me in my life. I like option button because it gives you the illusion of choice. Oh, choose any of these you want. But there's only two options actually. Yeah, it's either option or not option. It's, it's sorry, sorry. Um, the, uh, so then a, a logistical thing, bring everything with you as far as, um, music lessons, um, bring everything with you. Be outside the door early. It's a good lesson for, um, meetings and other things that are professional. Also, like you want to be a hair early to your meetings, um, for me and me only as a teacher, I encourage my students to, um, if they are prepared early and they have time to come and watch the lesson that's concluding before you, um, because I, I, I am okay with that group environment and I want the students to observe someone else taking a lesson because observing someone taking a lesson helps you when you're in the hot seat. So I open up the last half hour of my lessons to students to come in and observe. So if, if that's just me only, that's probably very few other teachers will, will allow that. But, um, just so you know, uh, then when it's your time to come in, you know, whatever your teacher's policy is, whether it's knocking or just coming right in or waiting for them to open the door, uh, follow that policy. And then for me, I come in and, you know, friendly, greet my teacher and immediately I'm setting up to perform. And then for me, I, I want to tell my teacher if there's anything that I hope to cover in that lesson and I'm not going to dictate to them what they're going to say. Like I, I won't say, hey, you know, I'm playing this piece and I really want you to, um, to focus on my, my, uh, sticking or something. Like maybe that's really helpful. But, uh, as a teacher, this goes back to what you had mentioned before with the Jason Haheim, quote, um, I respect and really admire Jason. But the, um, I feel like I want my teacher to give me their unimpeded input. So I'm not going to sit there and put parameters on what they can tell me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, that, that's part of the one level of thinking. You know, if a student comes to you and says, I'm really having trouble with this. I'm having trouble with this. I hope we can, we can, uh, address this today. It's the responsibility of the teacher to say actually the thing we need to address is this. If these are the symptoms. Yeah. Don't you think? Absolutely. And then that's the yes and like absolutely. Yes. Oh, you're having trouble with all those things. The common thread is time is it's time or it's sound quality or it's sticking or it's interpretation or something. So it's, I think it's the requirement of the teacher to take that input and go, that's cool. I mean, when you go to a doctor and you say, I have this thing and I have this thing and I have this thing. Therefore, I believe I have this. The doctor is generally not going to immediately go great. Well, I'll see you next time. Yeah. And that doctor hopefully would also, if you say, you know, I'm having problems with my big toe and you're there for your physical, hopefully they don't just look at the big toe and send you on your way. They actually do a survey of everything and how your your body is working before they do anything. And then they can focus on the big toe if that's still an issue. But for me as a, as a lesson taker, I do not want to guide my teacher and limit what they have to say because it's possible that what I think is a problem actually is not something that's the largest issue in the room. And I could be putting blinders on somebody who's there to guide me. And if I perform this piece or the segment of a piece or an excerpt for them, then I want their unadulterated input. So I have a question. Right. How would this change? This is a larger question. I wanted to ask you, how would this change if someone is studying with you for a long period of time? versus a single encounter, i.e. a masterclass or something. How would that change what you would say as a student or how you would present as a student? I feel the masterclass situation is usually a place where you want to get that person's thought. Essentially, I want a thought and a vibe. I'm getting a vibe from this person. The masterclass teacher is, I mean, I guess it depends on the instrument. The Jerusalem Music Center puts out these YouTube videos of Marie Pariah teaching masterclasses. It's so wonderful to hear him go through every single little thing about Beethoven Sonata or Chopin Ballot or something. In a masterclass setting, you don't really have the time to nitpick every single little thing. Usually it's just a one encounter you send a vibe or you get a vibe from a teacher of how they think that you were doing. If somebody's sitting there and they're talking about the key signature and what does rhythm mean, then that tells me as a student where I am on the ladder. If there's somebody who's talking to me about what it means to play Chopin's left hand part to a nocturn and what the sound quality is of this specific piano, then I know that I'm on my way. For me, a masterclass situation is getting just a one shot. How am I doing? What's the vibe of this person interaction? Whereas you and me on a long term scale is me playing the long game and letting you develop at your pace. I don't know. What do you think? I broadly agree. To some extent, the masterclasses sort of fake experience. I totally agree. I think a common thing we're talking about today, if I had to extract the larger theme, is the requirement of people who study in the arts or who study anything in the humanities. To articulate, well, what was the thing we were really talking about? Like we were talking about with dairy or with sort of what did we talk about in the masterclass? I totally agree. It's a great way. I think when you're teaching long term, you have this additional thing that you can do or you have to do, which is to sort of be a part of a long term development of a person, a sustainable development. Not a kind of development where after every lesson you're back to, you hate yourself or something, but helping someone develop along the way. That's going to include a lot of epiphanies, but it's also going to include some tough times. I think a long term development, you have to connect those experiences in some way. I love to surprise my students, but you can't be fundamentally surprised after 16 weeks. I really like to say things that might really surprise them, because for those of us as teachers, we have more experiences than we put into our lessons. Once in a while, it's fun to freak them out and say something like, "Actually, I do play this way. What are you going to do with that?" That's my thought, is that when you have the option to play the long game, it's something. In a masterclass, as a masterclass teacher, as a masterclass giver, there's generally a public element. You are either the, either it's not about you and then the masterclass giver is going to talk about what they're going to talk about no matter what you did, or it's like you said, it's an indication of what you are doing. Because theoretically, the masterclass teacher doesn't know you. That's an awesome opportunity to get the feedback of somebody. What is on the tip of this person's tongue after seeing you play? Which is essentially like a possible audience member for your performance. This is the most critical, thoughtful audience member you could ever have. It is a probable outcome of an audience member. Maybe not all audience members are as perceptive as this person you're setting the masterclass with. How many times will you give a concert? And somebody is in the audience and they'll come up to you afterwards and offer their honest feedback. Right? A lot of times you do a concert and if you're lucky to talk to an audience member, they might come up and say, hey, you know, look like you should have had roller skates back there. Or, wow, you know, that was, that was sure was something, but they're, they're probably there for the free cheese board. And maybe not there to actually offer you a concrete feedback. So yeah, take it while you can. I'm sorry, I'm a terrible student. I've been derailing you. But I thought that this would be a good opportunity for us to maybe talk about that, that post lesson routine. What does yours look like? Okay, well, I would just say as a caveat, the research I'm working on now, a lot of it is about separating the here's what I do. I'm making air quotes now. Here's what I do. Therefore, you should do that too, because that's how you learn from. Okay, here's what somebody says about what to learn, but here's what there's an aggregate of experts, but also science says about how we learn. So it's, it's really helpful to, to give my own opinion, but it's also extremely not helpful. So here are some things that I think are maybe more on the universal that I would recommend, maybe not necessarily what I did as a student, but okay, tips, tips. I don't know if that resonates for people, but sometimes we get locked into this teacher student, single teacher thing, and it can be really deleterious. So, okay, review the lesson recording. Yep, make time as soon after the lesson as possible. I like to, I like to make an outline the lesson. I know some people like to transcribe it, but I think making an outline is more difficult and more important because you have to decide the hierarchy of thoughts. What is Roman numeral one? What is Roman numeral two? What point was the most important point? We just been a whole bunch of minutes talking about extrapolating the theme of a teacher. So this is the way for you to articulate. Oh, the big thing we talked about was like mallet choice and then number two, we talked about this. Okay, focus and relisten to important moments again. You will not be able to make an outline on one lesson. Go back and forth, learn the keyboard shortcuts on your computer for jumping back and forth. Make a list of problems you want to solve or make a list of things you want to address, like an actual list. For me, I think it's really helpful to have a list of like most wanted passages in a piece, the sort of, okay, these are the 10 that I'm sending my federal agents out to look for when I practice. Okay, the next thing synthesize. This is the thing that I think expert learners can do, which is to make connections between that point and everything else that's going on in your life. This is why I like to go to museums because I love the way. Look, how did this museum organize these paintings? Yeah, is it every painting by one artist or are there paintings back and forth between different topics or the same topic. So if you can make those connections of, for example, if I take a lesson with Mike T and the whole lesson, we're talking about different ways to phrase something on the moon, but it's definitely my responsibility to do that when I play the snare drum. Yeah, right, to make those connections. I think when we learn it's helpful to have themes, like a broader theme, like right now I'm working on my sound. And, you know, you might be learning piece of music X, but it's kind of on the front of your mind. So make those connections. And then refine really, really refine. See how strong, how deep can I go on these ideas. I actually think that sometimes it's you, it can actually be really helpful to develop a strong, strong, strong opinion and show up at the next lesson and play it, even if it's not exactly what your teacher said to do. But I think you want to transition after the lesson you this is not on my list, but you want to transition from being from having a teacher to having a coach. Right, the teacher will dig in and tell you, you know, your ring fingers. working in this way. A coach will say, here's what you tried to do. Here's the thesis of your performance. Here's how you interpreted this. These are the moments that stick out as not being consistent. Let's work on those. I think, I don't know, but I think long term, you want to make your teacher your coach. I love it. Right. So I think that's that's what I would try to do after the lesson to go, how can I bring these ideas in a coherent way, not the way we're doing this podcast. I'll go here and how can you do that in such a way that that inspires your teacher to look at what you're doing in full? I love that. Those are my post lesson tips. They're kind of big though. Oh, but I would underscore those. I think a lot of the ones that I brainstormed up are very similar. Like you want a period right after your lesson of reflection and review. And then you want to have a punch list for the week. What are the things I need to get done this week? And it could be you could organize them like you're talking about. It could be technical, musical, personal. And so you want a punch list after you reviewed. And then it's basically go for attack that. Like make a make a plan for short term long term. What's the punch list for now? This week till next week when I see my teacher in one week. And then what's how am I doing on my long term plan for the semester? Am I taking care of a business? Am I diversifying my my knowledge base enough? If you find yourself like studying Xylophone excerpts for 15 weeks straight and nothing else, I don't believe if that's a great use of your undergraduate education. But the but you can keep track like every week. Evaluate that long term plan. So reflect and review punch list and go for it. Wow. I like that. Yes. Yeah. So if I were listening to this podcast and I and I wanted to do what we said. Okay. I would probably go through and try to make an outline of all the tips. Like let me write down every tip these bozos offered. And then let's see if there's like a theme behind them. Yeah. And I think the theme that we articulated in general was ownership of your learning pro activity around your learning. Analysis like detail the analysis of what you are doing in an objective way. And being receptive to ways of refining that and honing that. Constant development. Professionalism in development. And like we've talked about before investment in yourself. Yeah. To some extent. And what else am I forgetting? That's up. The I think the the the approach that that these these times with your teacher are are finite. And the ability to have a teacher is basically relegated to one era of your life. So there'll be a time where you always have access to us as teachers. And we are always there to help you and support you. But it's a different kind of relationship after you leave school. And it's a luxurious relationship when you're in school to have that. Yeah. You know, when you're out of school, your lesson taking might look like I'm going to have this one lesson. And that's enough to sustain me for five months, six months. Yeah. I have to take an audition. So I'm going to study once with one person. And if you have the ability to extract the marrow out of that lesson, then then that's that's going to help you because that that lesson you take for that audition might be $300 an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And how do you prepare for that by practicing taking lessons? Practicing taking lessons. When the stakes are a little bit lower. Yep. And you've got eight semesters times 14 lessons to do it. And let's your student teaching. Oh my goodness. Well, that's a whole other thing we didn't talk about. I mean, this whole conversation is kind of pre-saged by that implication we're talking about one-on-one lessons in a music school environment. But the idea of classroom teaching is something that I don't know if I'm qualified to think about it. Well, I've really enjoyed this. I enjoyed getting to to think about it. And thanks for your thoughts, Mike. That was that was really helpful to me. I feel like I want to go back. And I want to go back and take lessons now. Me too. No, I think I think when we're teachers, one of the greatest joys of being a teacher is to learn from your students. And when your students are proactive in asking you questions, you get better as a teacher. I think you know, you really, you improve, you hone how you describe how to do something. You hone eliminating dogma from what you're doing in the service of more objectivity maybe or at least more humanity or something or more empathy. But I think that's something that we're really lucky to do. And now, like you said, I want to go take some, take some lessons. Yeah, I feel like I'm like yearning for lessons right now. So like I love the dentist telling me tips on how to improve my brushing or my dental health. And I love the physician telling me how I can take better care of my body or the, you know, the clerk at the grocery store telling me how I can put my items in the bag in a more efficient way, like keeping all the frozen items together or the heavier stronger things at the bottom. Like I'm just can't wait for info. Give me info life because I just don't have it anymore. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, thanks Mike. This has been super fun. I hope that everyone out there has enjoyed reflecting on your, on your lesson taking experience. And we look forward to sharing more with you. So for now, here's Mike drop, drop in the mic. See ya. [Music]