You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Isaac, one of our sons, said to me as a young lad, “I could never play the piano as good as you, Mum.”  I remember my response too: that not only could he be as good as me, but he could become even better. At that age he didn’t know what was possible. But the seed of possibility was planted.

I recently attended a seminar on building cultural awareness. We were hosting the folks taking the seminar in our home and I wanted to support what they were doing. One of the comments that came up in our discussions at home was: “People don’t know what they don’t know.” I confess that I thought I was pretty good at cultural awareness having lived and worked a good number of years in Asia, but figured there was always more to learn or contribute, so I went along. I learned some things I had not thought about—some helpful things to see my own culture better. I realised that I had been unaware of what I didn’t know and, from that, initially made the assumed conclusion I didn’t need to learn more.

I’ve seen this outworked in teaching music too. I’ve put together a course for parents who need help teaching their own children (Click here to purchase this course). In that course I have quite a bit of information that is vital to success when teaching one’s own children. You don’t know likely pitfalls until you have been through the process of actually teaching your own. Learning from someone else’s pitfalls can save a lot of time and heartache. Of course there is also value in learning from your own mistakes.

From a teacher’s perspective, I have seen so often how incredibly well a pupil does when they follow my suggestions on how to practice something, and how very poorly they do when they don’t.

The logic goes like something like this:

• She told me what to do.
• I understood what was supposed to happen in the music…
• therefore I know how the music goes…
• therefore I won’t need to practice it.

  But the actual result is:

• I can’t play it in the lesson a week later.

I explained to a pupil this week that it is a bit like showing your maths workings for the teacher’s reassurance. We teachers want to know that you know how you got there. For me, that you can count out the beats, so you can work out where the note values go—not that you got the hang of it by playing it by ear, yet have no clue how to decode what you are doing.

There is a place for using your ears and some folks who play by ear struggle to have the patience to persist in learning how to read music.  They don’t see the point in it. But I have come across a good number of folks like this who wish they did know how to read music. They have come to realise it actually is a valuable skill, even for someone who has reached a significant ability in playing their instrument without it.

There is so much to gain in learning to read music at the piano. Playing with independent hands takes time and your brain works hard. Having the stamina to work through the basics progressively to become skilled is an uncertain journey at first and seemingly impossible for the beginning player. They don’t yet know what I know: that if they persist and keep up the consistent, accurate, slow, careful, repetitious practice, they will look back one day and realise they have attained so much more than they imagined at the beginning.

That’s what happened to Isaac. He ended up studying classical piano through to obtaining a degree in jazz piano. He now has many skills at the piano that I don’t have. Only by looking back now can he testify that the seemingly impossible became a reality.