Practice and Improvement (2) - A Common Fallacy

It is often stated that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a skill.  This tends to reinforce the myth that if you do something for long enough, you will get better at it.  Let's take a closer look at this fallacy.

One of the biggest bodies of evidence to support this theory is the pool of failed guitarists, ie. those who never really got anywhere with the instrument, despite initial best intentions.  We could even include the huge number of bedroom players who stopped improving after reaching an intermediate level.  These days they dabble a little, but gave up on any thoughts of becoming experts a long time ago.

One thing these millions of players have in common, is that they didn't devote 10,000 hours to practising guitar.  Of these millions, none is an expert, therefore we have a very strong correlation between not practising for 10,000 hours, and not being an expert.

On the surface, this is a reasonably convincing argument, and one which can perpetuate the self-satisfying belief that one's lack of improvement is down to a lack of available time for dedication to the instrument.  However it falls horribly apart when considered to a deeper level.

Using terms borrowed from Frederic Bastiat's  "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen",

That which is seen - is the pool of millions of non expert players who failed to become experts because they didn't devote the required 10,000 hours to practising guitar.

That which is not seen - is the much smaller number of players who, despite investing 10,000 hours and many more, are not expert guitarists.

 That which is not seen - is the much smaller number of players who, despite investing less than 10,000 hours, *are* expert guitarists.

Examining these two "unseen" and mutually exclusive groups will be the topic of my next post.

Practice and Improvement (1) - An Overview

Each of us has a limited amount of time to practise our instrument.  For some, that can be eight hours a day or more.  For most it's substantially less than that.

There is a common mistaken tendency to infer that improvement is proportional to hours of practice.  In addition there is an resigned undercurrent of belief, that practice ought to be along the lines of the routine demonstrated in the above video.

Now, I'm not suggesting that there is no truth to these ideas.  However, I would claim that there are certainly times when these ideas have absolutely zero relevance to a student's progress, and that consequently, a more elegant approach to the topic is warranted.

21st Century Guitar Teacher (2)

Fast forward to 2004.  My teaching style hadn't changed much, but I had moved house and was about to become married and a father for the first time.  I had also wound up my previous business and was effectively unemployed.  The decision was made to become a full time guitar tutor and in early 2005 we had the garage converted into a teaching room.

 

All that was missing was a regular schedule of talented, hard-working students.  Where was I going to find them, I wondered.  As still mainly an issuer of information, I'd often feel, after a first lesson, as when I first began teaching, that what the student needed was practice, not lessons.  They already had enough information to improve, if only they would put the hours in to understand and master that information.  I'd suggest students got in touch when they were ready for more, and that would be the last I saw of them!  This was not conducive to building a regular teaching schedule, but I was uncomfortable at the idea of trying to milk students for money when I wasn't offering solid improvement in return.  It became very clear that if I wasn't going to flounder miserably at this, I had to learn to make people better at playing guitar.

 

Following this realisation, over the past 7 years, literally forcing people to improve, sometimes against their will, has become my speciality.  I view the best lessons as being  similar to a gym session, with a punishing trainer demanding more from every repetition.  Lessons are no longer merely a discussion, handing down of information and a suggestion of what to practice.  Lessons are practice, supervised, correct beneficial practice! 

 

Anyone can use the internet to find a chord chart or tablature for any song they want to play.  They can likely find videos to show them someone else doing it.  All for free!  What the internet lacks is information on how to get one's fingers and mind to do it, how to fill in the gaps of understanding that stop students playing the music they enjoy in the way that they want to. What is missing is better understanding of how to practise.  Hence, put simply ...

 

 

The role of the 21st Century guitar teacher is to teach students how to practise!

 

 

Next time we'll look at the product of good practice ... Improvement!!

21st Century Guitar Teacher (1)

As in so many walks of life, the greatest change in the pursuit of learning guitar nowadays has been brought about by the sheer amount of information available via the internet.  The music for just about any song is available, together with video lessons to demonstrate, and endless pages of background to every piece of theory or technique imaginable.  A far cry from the 1980s when I began to play.

 

 

Back then, a major part of a guitar teacher's job was issuing this same information little by little to his students.  Students could shortcut (or eliminate) this process by buying books and magazines to teach themselves, or sit patiently in lessons while their teacher painstakingly handwrote the next golden nugget of information to be offered up.

By the time I had begun to teach (casually to friends and their children) in the mid 1990s, not much had changed.  The internet was only just beginning to spread on a mass scale, and the contained knowledge base was primitive by today's standards.

So, I taught like I had been taught (in the 3 or 4 lessons I ever took).  I wrote out the students' next step to work on, demonstrated it, watched them struggle with it a little and answered questions as best I could. Then they were sent off to master the new information, in the expectation they'd return next week ready to move onto the next stage.  Rarely, very rarely was this the case.  Clearly it was their own fault because they weren't practising enough.  At least, it seemed that way to me at the time.

Looking back, aside from being an adept issuer of the information, the only real angle of attack I had for many of the problems at hand was the same angle I had been fed for years from all the teaching sources I had encountered.

Keep doing it and you'll get it!

 

Unfortunately this (for most) was not the case.  As a result, by the turn of the century,  I had a bunch of students who were not progressing making up the majority of my part-time schedule.  I was plagued with cancellations, no shows and students quitting out of the blue.  It was clear if I was to ever make a go of teaching guitar as a profession, I had a lot of learning to do myself.



Introduction

Welcome!  A little introduction ...

I started playing back in February 1985, at the age of 17, looking for a quick distraction from some heavy A' Level Maths study.  There was a guitar in the house and a tiny book with a few popular songs I recognised.  Though I'd never thought about picking it up before, I was instantly hooked.  Now, twenty-seven and a half years later I still am!

Within 3 years I had played my first gigs and made a first demo recording, and by the early 1990s was gigging locally on a regular basis.  In 1994, I joined Warwick's "Hangover Blues Band" and over the next ten years, racked up over 800 gigs playing semi-pro all over the country.

From 2001, I had begun taking on students, with a view to maybe teaching guitar for a living, and by 2004 I had decided that this was definitely what I intended to do.  I had the garage out the back of the house converted into a comfortable teaching room, and was all set.  The only snag ... I wasn't a very good teacher!

In this blog, I plan to outline and examine many of the issues, problems and questions which I've encountered as both guitarist and guitar teacher, and hopefully draw some interesting discussion from anyone who passes through.

Paul Swanson

www.psgt.co.uk