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Both my wife and I teach our respective instruments to help have a steady income stream alongside our highly fluctuating performance side of things. And teaching can a varied bag of inspiring and frustrating.

One particular interesting source of both side is the teaching of adults... and I don't mean professional musicians coming to us for specialist advice and feedback... I mean amateur musicians who are either learning the instrument new, or rediscovering an instrument that they let lapse.

Definitely, they do come in two flavours... the ones who are still able to learn how to learn... and the ones that have forgotten.

The first group are able to take feedback and advice from us (the teacher/expert) and slowly and deliberately apply the knowledge and skills to slowly enhance and grow their own skills and understanding. Those are the best students... and because they are older, you can also start to focus on more abstract concepts that can be difficult for the younger ones to grasp.

However, there are quite a few of the older cohort that find it difficult. I guess that it has much to do with their intervening professional lives... and they have forgotten what it is to slowly and painstaking master a task and skills over the course of years.

Quite often they are impatient to progress and get frustrated when we try to get them to slow down and to actually listen and observe what they are doing musically and physically... sure, anyone can bash out something... but in a way that makes sense, is efficient, and has meaning and purpose... not quite the same.

... and quite often the end goal is to get the notes out in the right order, at roughly the right time... and that is sufficient... but as far as we see it, it is ONLY the starting point.

... and you will have noticed that I keep mentioning the word SLOWLY... and that can be the hardest thing to grasp... when your skill levels are low, going too fast means that you are completely overwhelmed and you aren't aware of anything other than pure survival. No nuance... and no awareness when things have go astray!

Oddly enough, we have both found that it is relatively successful older men... those that have done a bit in their other lives... that have the greatest difficulty in adjusting to becoming a beginner and applying themselves again. Perhaps it is the ease with which things came to them based upon their previous social authority or something...

... but they can get quite frustrated and start to get cranky... and we have to massage their egos a bit, and continually get them to SLOW down and introspect and examine the root causes for their difficulties. After all, if playing a musical instrument was trivial... then everyone would do it!

But, instead we both get comments like.... I've seen kids do this... you just pick up the instrument and then start playing it like it is easy whilst I have so much difficulty...

... well, the kids are trained in a different way... and my wife and I... well, we have had a roughly 4 decade headstart on you... so, I would be sort of worried if we weren't significantly more at one with our instruments!

My wife and I keep talking about how best to manage these students... it is tricky, you can't be too harsh... but if it was a child, professional, or a tertiary student... you would be harsh to snap their thinking into something realistic. But sandcastle egos... it is really weird.

Sigh... will have to think more about how to manage this.

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