How to learn something properly...

I have this great student.

I have loads of them actually, but today’s column concerns one in particular.

My friend and colleague Dave Flynn works across the corridor from me in Strandhill, so we often hear snippets from each other’s lessons. He stopped me one day and asked about what he had just heard coming from my room. It was the piano solo from Vince Guaraldi’s O Tannenbaum, recorded in 1965 as part of the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas. A jazz piano version of O Christmas Tree.

“Are you learning it?”, he asked me. “No”, I said. “Actually well yes”, I clarified as I realised that in order to teach it, I firstly had to learn it myself. But when I told Dave that what he had heard wasn’t me but a 15 year-old, his jaw dropped.

“Never mind”, he said. “All you have to do is stay one step ahead of him”! Thanks Dave.

All joking aside, I love when students like this come along. I don’t know where the music comes from in the family, but it’s certainly there. His older brother is similarly talented. Their musical choices always interest me. And often challenge me too.

Because in order to teach this solo properly, I have to break it down. And that involves knowing it inside out. Part of this process is to send on a video of me playing the solo. Slowly, and in time with a metronome.

One day at home I had put a solid hour into the first few bars of this piece. I took a short break and asked my wife to take a video so I could send it on.

But I couldn’t play it. It was no more than 5 minutes later but my flow had gone. What had been smooth and coherent was now rough and jumbled. And certainly not fit to send to a student.

So I tried to figure out what had happened. And I thought of how I often advise students that 15 minutes practice every day is better than an hour the day before the lesson. Why? Because spaced repetition is the key to proper learning.

What I had done was some musical cramming. Spend an hour on the material, then try to reproduce it a short time later. And I couldn’t.

When I went back to it a day later however, although I couldn’t play it perfectly, it didn’t take me an hour this time. The day after it took a shorter time again. And that’s the smart way to learn things. Not all at once, but reinforcing at regular intervals. Spaced repetition.

His next choice, by the way? Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing. I knew this one – phew!

Heroes...

The question was posed on one of those glorious Monday sessions. The ones that aren’t allowed any more. The best of times - in The Strand most probably. Everyone we knew was at work, but we were off. Basking in the aftermath of a big win, with nothing to do and all day to do it.

Then the point of the day arrived where things had settled and conversations got deep and serious for a while.

“Who are the three men you look up to most in the world?” Fathers/brothers/uncles etc weren’t allowed.

And so for a couple of hours, we talked about our heroes. No surprise – they were mainly sportsmen. Roy Keane, Muhammad Ali, Robert DeNiro, Jack Charlton, even Duncan Ferguson were all mentioned. We were at the sweet spot of the day. The craic was good yet we were getting into some real issues. Or so it seemed at the time. Certainly as real as it gets on a Monday afternoon in the pub.

I thought of this day recently as I found myself once again picking up a book I never thought I’d finish once, let alone twice. It concerns American sports and business and I’m not hugely interested in either. But what drew me back to it was the depiction by author Jeff Benedict of Robert Kraft – owner of the New England Patriots.

Kraft had many skills but perhaps his greatest achievement was keeping the band together. He was the man The Beatles needed when Mr. Epstein died. He figured early on that he had the best coach (Bill Belichick) and the best quarterback (Tom Brady) in the league, and then spent 20 years creating the conditions where they could do their thing. Together. Because they did it better than anyone else around.

However like Keane, Ali or Charlton, Kraft isn’t perfect. No-one is. Not even Tom Brady. Yet while people are flawed, their actions can be great. That’s the whole point of heroes. They do things that inspire us. They make us want to do great things too.

In order to look up to them however, you firstly have to know about them. So many of us admire great athletes, film stars and musicians only because they are the ones to whom we are exposed. They are the ones whose talents get displayed to the world.

But what about people in other fields? Less visible ones. Experts in areas that really interest us. The potential heroes we don’t know about yet might inspire us if we were aware of the details of their lives.

So go find them. Read about them. Be enlightened by them. At the very least they might prompt a great conversation some Monday afternoon.