After seven or eight years of taking guitar lessons, I took what might seem like a logical step and began to teach students of my own through the university. I'd considered teaching lessons in the past but had always stopped short. The prospect of seeing ""Instructor"" or even ""Student Teacher"" next to my name in a staff directory made me nervous, as if, decades in the future, one of my pupils would look back on a lifetime of drug addiction and trace the cause of their problems to the failure of a guitar instructor they'd had in college.
Still, I wanted another job, and teaching a musical instrument paid well and offered me the chance to dole out my years of acquired knowledge at one hour per week—a rate at which, I figured, I could last at least through fall semester. I was also attracted by what I saw as my chance to carve out an identity among the more talented and better-trained members of the music program as the hip, ever-so-slightly rebellious instructor. This was a desire which—as long as I wasn't forced to write anything down—I decided to let serve as my teaching philosophy. As far as lesson plans went, I hoped that my students would all arrive at their first meetings with a stack of songs I already knew and a complete lack of interest in jam, folk, heavy metal or blues.
Because I was just starting out as an instructor, most of the students assigned to me were beginning from scratch. This worked out well in one sense, because for the first few weeks I would be allowed to dictate the agenda without interruption. There may be more styles of music for guitar than for any other instrument, but whether a person dreams of strumming along with Cat Stevens' songs at religious retreats or spilling lamb's blood onto an audience at a Norwegian black metal festival, the first month or so of instruction is mostly identical. I realized that one of my beginning students might eventually advance to the point of asking to learn their favorite Grateful Dead song, but I was hoping that before it got to that point, one of us might simply disappear.
Eager to get my lesson plan on track as soon as possible, I arrived at the first round of lessons with enough material to cover the first week and a notebook that I had purchased because, being the same age as my students, I needed something to attest to my professional credentials—something cheap. I could've planned further ahead, but my hope was that, without too much prodding, the students would jump in and suggest what they'd like to work on for the rest of the semester. This would simultaneously make the lessons more entertaining for them and shift the potential blame from my shoulders if they became bored or impatient. ""Oh, I could make a few suggestions,"" I'd say, if pressed. ""But what do you want out of this?""
Three weeks later, this question was still largely unanswered. Although our early lessons had gone relatively well, few of the students had suggested any musical preferences whatsoever, and I had run out of ways to wheedle the information out of them. Making matters more complicated was the fact that several of the ‘undecideds' were international students, to whom Bob Dylan was no more or less familiar than Fire Engines or Beat Happening, and so, in the interest of saving time, I began to assign them personalities.
Picturing my Monday morning student's slightly spiked hair and black jacket, I mentally propped him up on stage with a cigarette and a defiant sneer. In reality, he was a soft-spoken business student from Seoul, but for the next three months I would try to steer him toward a future in punk rock. Likewise, I began to plot my Thursday afternoon student's singer-songwriter career, while thinking of how best to get the woman I taught on Tuesdays into a hard-partying bar band. For the first time since beginning to work with these students I felt like I had a plan I could be confident in, and, imagining myself as the wizened instructor who knew how to make these dreams come true, I set about deciding how I would get my Monday student to start smoking.
Wanna step outside for a cigarette? E-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
