by Scott Kolecki

Created on: September 12, 2008

I have been a musician my entire life. As a child, I was encouraged by my parents to study music at an early age. Piano lessons were mandatory in my house. By the time I started kindergarten, I had already been in lessons for a year. I was fortunate that music came easily to me, and though I didn't put anywhere near the effort into it that I should have, at least in my early years, I excelled in music. Many people said that I had "natural ability" and, whether or not that was true, music became my passion.

When I entered college, I became a studio music instructor. I thought that it would be as easy to teach music as it always had been when I was learning it. I got my first batch of students and, over the course of just a few months, succeeded in discouraging almost all of them to give up on their music. I was dumbfounded by this. I started asking each of them what their reasons were for wanting to quit and overwhelmingly, the response was that "I wasn't able to make music make sense to them." I further discovered that many of my students, especially my adult students, had decided to study music without any real belief that they could actually learn to play. Several claimed that they had no natural ability whatsoever and that they were simply there because they had always regretted not learning as a child.

After learning this, I gave a lot of thought to what my students were saying. I also recalled how my instructors had worked with me. While I had several music teachers in the course of my life, the one's that helped me the most were the ones that made no assumptions about my abilities. They were the ones who would break music down to the most basic fundamentals and push those until I had really mastered them.

I developed a theory. It wasn't that my students were incapable or that they either possessed or lacked natural ability, but that as an instructor, I had been making assumptions about their ability based on how I had learned music. I discovered that many music teachers did exactly the same thing and, as a result, if the student wasn't capable of learning at a pace or in a fashion that met the expectation of the teacher, it was generally assumed that the fault must lie on the student and they simply lacked the ability to learn.

I decided to test this theory with my own students. When I returned to lessons the following week, I cast aside my own teaching agenda and started trying to understand how my students were approaching their music. Almost universally,

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