Parallel melodies

(Reflections on music, learning and teaching)
Jeremy Harmer, Cambridge, UK

When I'm doing the washing up I don't find much allegorical or metaphorical resonance with my work as a teacher, or as a speaker of a second language, though I reckon that someone more imaginative than me would find it easy to come up with some profound connection.
Driving doesn't make me think of classes either; neither does ironing, or mowing the grass or exercising (infrequently) or tearing around Cambridge on a bicycle.
But music, which is where I would spend all my time if I could, is a different matter. Time and time again its melodies are paralleled by language learning and teaching events, and experiences I have had as only a moderate (but passionate) viola player keep nudging my teacher/learner consciousness and telling me things about my professional life that I had sometimes forgotten. Here are three of such events:

The audition

To get into (and stay in) the orchestra I play with you have to audition every three years. The audition takes place in front of the conductor (a friend) and the leader of the orchestra (ditto). You play your prepared piece with an accompanist and do some sight-reading. It shouldn't be too bad, after all. But it is. Possibly the most nerve-wracking experience I have been through for years. For there, in that room, just you, the accompanist and two others, you have the potential to make a complete fool of yourself; there in front of two real expert professional musicians (three if you count the accompanist) the distance between your abilities and theirs will be plainly demonstrated. Friendship can't mask that.
Nerves can do terrible things to people. In the case of string players (in my case anyway) it makes your bow arm (or rather your bow wrist) shake ridiculously so that the bow bounces on the string and the notes come out like the scrapings of cats' claws instead of the sonorous melodies you had hoped to produce. Beta-blockers help, though. And you feel better if you have prepared your piece really well and feel confident with it.
In my professional life I am a trainer and an external examiner on the Cambridge ESOL DELTA scheme. Auditioning has taught me to recognise the power of nerves in a way that, perhaps, I had previously forgotten. It has helped me to see beyond the teachers' 'bow wrists' to the music that is underneath. Of course teaching is not playing a prepared piece of music. The mark of a really good teacher, after all, is how she or he reacts to the students, and non-improvisational music is less concerned with that kind of thing. Yet the ability to hear and react is often compromised by the brain activity that nerves seem to require.
What can be done about this? Well, in the first place the event of observation needs to be de-formalised as far as that is possible, and on top of that the demeanour of the examiner has to be able to lower that nervous hurdle. External examiners need to understand, yet again, what the teacher in front of them is going through. I am not arguing against observing teachers to see if they measure up; only that it should be as humane as possible.
I have been given some leeway in my auditions because my assessors must have thought there was some small ability hiding behind the nerves. As an external assessor, I have learnt from that experience and, as a result, I think I have become better than before at seeing 'beyond'.

The lesson

Learning an instrument teaches you a lot about one-to-one teaching. The effect of the teacher's mood and welcome is extraordinary, as are the rare times when she is unable to conceal her lack of interest. There are lessons when she is quite keen to engage in idle chat, and there are times when your irritation, as a learner, at your lack of progress, is marked. Sometimes you wish she'd do what you wanted rather than concentrate on details that irk you. But then! But then there are the gold moments when, as the learner, you suddenly understand and incredibly, after worrying away at some bowing technique or difficult left-hand fingering for weeks and weeks, there in the lesson you can do it! How can that be possible? It must be something she said or showed you, something she's tried to explain time and time again, apparently without success. Yet now it's happened! The post-lesson euphoria lasts for hours.
Perhaps it's the amount of practice that does it. Presumably the more you practice for a lesson the better the lesson will be (and the better you will be in that lesson). Well, yes and no. Sometimes practice works, sometimes it seems to have little effect. Or rather - and this is crucial - sometimes practice only works much much later!
I have learned a lot as a music student. I have learned how important it is for students to believe their teacher really cares about them and their progress - and how dispiriting it is if that care appears to be missing (I am lucky enough to have had teachers who seem to care far more often than not). I have learned that there is no one-to-one relationship between what happens in a particular lesson and the learning of new skills, and that one of my teacher's principal roles is to send me away with hope even when the lesson hasn't been that productive. I am ashamed to note that even at this age I still yearn for her approval! I have learned that the gold moments, the incredible feeling of the clichéd light-bulb going off in your head, make everything worth it. I have learned that learning doesn't necessarily progress at an ordered and regular pace but, on the contrary comes in fits and starts, peaks and troughs. You get to the next level, perhaps, only when you are ready for it. And I have learned that my teacher's persistence, sometimes in the face of great obstacles, is a great gift.
Teachers do the best they can, in the most sensitive way possible. And even when it seems hopeless they have to keep going at it, on and on, trying all sorts of different ways to help students understand, because, sooner or later it will happen. But it is, in the end, the learners who make the running and control the pace.

The performance

Some concerts go better than others. Perhaps, occasionally, the players are not that well rehearsed. Perhaps the music just hasn't sparked for some reason. Perhaps the audience have brought a strange lack of enthusiasm into the hall.
But when it works, well there probably isn't anything to compare to being in the middle of a symphony orchestra in full cry. When you feel the music sounding like that, and that wonderful contact between players, music and audience, it's magical. It's (in my mind) something like the 'flow' that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has talked about and which has attracted the attention of so many commentators and methodologists. It's like when you watch a football team playing in perfect harmony, all 11 players working with the same belief and energy (and just as you can see the loss of hope ripple across a pitch, so, sometimes, you can feel a loss of confidence worm its way through an orchestra - but enough of that!).
Part of the fun, for an individual player when things go right, is the sheer joy of fluency, and the excitement of performance. It's that feeling of (excuse another cliché) being 'on a roll', of suddenly being extraordinarily able. And it occurs to me that when that happens in my second language - no, even when it happens in my first language - I get the same kind of thrill. When language is suddenly there for you, and - that word again - it flows, it can fill you with joy.
If you listen to professional orchestral players grumbling (and they do!), they'll tell you that conductors aren't worth the rostrums they stand on, but I don't believe that. Not for us amateurs, anyway. Because sometimes that man can wrench performances out of us that we never believed possible. And of course it's us. But it's him too, playing us like one instrument, not eighty. And although I can't say exactly what his motivation is, I always feel profoundly grateful when he has enabled us to do the very best we can because it feels great!
Of course smaller groups and some orchestras do very well without a conductor, thank you very much and that's fine. But when this guy stands there and helps us do it, it looks like he cares. Why else would he provoke us to make and experience that magic?
This is getting a bit sentimental! He's probably just doing his job just like teachers do. But whether that's true or not, when he's on form we believe him, just as, when we are on form, our students should be able to believe us. If we can inspire the same excitement of performance in language students as a good conductor can with an orchestra, well that would be something worthy of pride.

Melodic lines

Persistance, patience, an ability to see 'beyond' sound ideal qualities for a teacher to study to acquire. From the students' perspective knowing that the teacher cares enough to want to help you do your very best seems to me to be some kind of ideal. That's the kind of teacher I strive to be. The kind of teacher who helps the learners to play their hearts out.