5 Tips For Strong Student-Teacher Connections | Toxic Relationships [Part 1] (ft. Rosie Bennet)
This week on the tonebase Blog, Rosie introduces the new topic of “toxic relationships” and examines how the student-teacher connection can quickly go south. Read on to learn her five tips for building a successful, long-term relationship with your own teacher!
Relationships are one of the most important parts of our cognitive makeup. How we view the people around us and how we believe we fit into their lives is the thing that ultimately defines how we conduct our personalities.
As a young person, the relationships you see between people can shape the way you act not only within relationships but also towards yourself.
This ‘copy paste’ attitude with how we treat our relationships is not only present during early childhood development, but spans until we are well into our teenage years, where we transition from only subconsciously learning how people interact, to consciously collecting pieces of people’s personalities that we believe are desirable.
All of these things are perfectly normal, we are using these traits to our advantage, learning how to help people like us, trust us and respect us and we measure the effectiveness of these traits against how our actions and words affect other people in our daily lives, constantly updating, making tiny adjustments.
By the end of our adolescence we feel that we understand how we should treat people, and how we should expect to be treated.
There are many things that can stunt or alter our attitudes towards relationships, there are times when we will miss the context of a situation, say something out of place, or end up hurting people.
But in a career where people are so sure they are intelligent, and emotionally intelligent at that, it always astounds me that people with perfectly good intentions can subconsciously partake in and even perpetuate the toxic behaviors that exist in the classical music world.
As children, or even just as people arriving at a subject we know nothing about, learning is inherently dogmatic. It is through no fault of our teacher or our own that we learn things as law and stick to those practices for as long as we are allowed to believe that these are the only options.
However, as much as it is our job to trust our teacher with our learning, it is our teachers’ job to encourage that we learn based on our own abilities, preferences and tastes. The job of a teacher is to mentor and coach, but unfortunately within certain classical music circles, teaching becomes a basic form of ownership.
Perhaps it is a tradition that the previous generation of teachers find it difficult to stray from; after all — many of them earned their own success through being taught in this way.
However, in a world where we are increasingly spreading a narrative of self love and self acceptance, it just doesn’t seem to fit that a teacher’s main tool is such harsh criticism that students feel so embarrassed about their playing, that they become totally dependent on that one person.
As a young person involved with music, we have probably all felt the wrath of ownership, manifested mostly in the embarrassment of letting a teacher down, and it is interesting that the positive sides of being ‘owned’ — being part of a high level class, expecting immediate respect for being part of this class — often are shadowed by the feeling that despite this achievement we are not good enough or do not belong.
It is not normal to feel that any praise you are given or criticism you are given on your playing is meaningless compared to that of your teacher — other people’s opinions are equally as valid.
It is not normal to search only for the happiness of your teacher in interpretation of a piece that you are playing.
It is not normal to feel that if you take a class with another professor, play in a competition or play a concert your teacher will be mad if it has not been organized by them. These things are not normal.
So what to do?
At heart we must understand that our teachers have good intentions. Our teachers want us to succeed, they want us to be happy, just like a parent. Here are five suggestions for helping them help you:
- The strongest thing you can do to assure your teacher is to be secure with the music you make. If you believe strongly that an interpretative feature your teacher wants you to do is not in your taste, search for writings on this music, search for interpretations you love and bring them to your teacher, discuss options and try to encourage two way conversation over the music that you are playing.
- Organize concerts/competition trips/ lessons with other teachers. One of the most important parts of our job as musicians is to not put one person’s opinion on a pedestal. If we truly believe that everybody is musical and that we make music for everybody, the opinion of an audience member should be just as valid to you as your teachers’. The only opinion of your playing that you should hold in unequally high regard should be your own!
- Ask questions. If your teacher works with keyhole suggestions (musical suggestions that are not based on musical evidence — for example ‘that B should be longer’) try to squeeze tangible meaning out of what they are saying, search for phrasing patterns, etc.
- Learn secret pieces in your own time, enjoy chamber music with friends, keep making music that will not be judged by your teacher. Self preservation in these situations may require you to rediscover your love of music, which can be conflicting mentally with why you take this career so seriously, understand that this is a perfectly normal response to a very challenging relationship with your teacher, which is feeding into your relationship with music. Know that this feeling is sensible, and also changeable, the brain is more powerful than we can imagine.
- Know that you are not alone. Know that the negative feelings you are cultivating towards yourself are an illusion of an unhealthy relationship with somebody you are rightly trusting. The world isn’t easy and you must learn to trust yourself. Music is an incredibly demanding career, you are probably doing great already!
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the “Toxic Relationships” series, coming soon…
About Rosie Bennet
Born in London in 1996, Rosie started playing guitar at age seven. She received her early musical education at The Yehudi Menuhin School of Music and went on to study with Zoran Dukic (The Hague, NL), Johan Fostier (Tilburg, NL), Rene Izquierdo (Milwaukee, USA) and Raphaella Smits (Leuven, BE). She has performed in festivals all over Europe, including Open Guitar Festival in Křivoklát, Czech Republic, Glasgow’s Big Guitar Weekend, Scotland, Porziano Music Festival, Italy and the West Dean guitar Festival, UK. Highlights of her concert career include performances at Wigmore Hall, London, The North Wall, Oxford and concerts given on El Camino De Santiago.
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