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Should music lessons be about working hard, playing hard, or both?
In his interview with the Music Manifesto, National Music Week artist Lil' Chris spoke of his frustrating experiences in school music lessons. He insisted music learning should be about having fun, whereas his teacher always advocated hard work. Who would you side with?
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I have written before that I think there is too much "fun" across the curriculum and students are denied a different kind of experience: the pleasure of working hard and reaping the benefits plus the satisfaction that it was down to your own hard work that you achieved your success. That is the real thing. Fun can be had along the way but must not replace or deny the fact that music-making requires skill, hard-work, dedication and some hard graft.
Music should be intersting, to them, not necssarily to you. Then they work hard and have fun with the end result achieved.
I do not see why these should be separated! It is perfectly possible to have 'fun' whilst working hard. Teaching styles may have changed but our learning objectives have not!
You do have a good point. Working hard and playing hard are not to be seperated, while making sure to have fun. Also, teachers need to teach their students to gain a passion for their music.
As an independent music teacher, I come down on the side of fun usually. My pupils have to work very hard and are willing to do so because we laugh a lot. This is helpful to singers especially, because feeling tense can really muck up your chances of developing in your lessons. However, ultimately intense focus is really what indivdiual tuition is all about.
As a languages teacher who has tried, so far unsucessfully to break the mould and teach music, too, I am tired of the emphasis on having fun as if that excludes hard work. At least one generation of children has been denied the pleasure of working hard at something and reaping the rewards of their efforts. There is so much fun to be had accross the curriculum that puils are satiated - the equivalent of a diet of popcorn with no meat and veg. Hard work produces a different kind of fun which most musicians may remember from their own development - the "aha!" moment when something difficult suddenly makes sense.
I think we need to identify the type of 'fun' involved. There's fun = messing about, joking around, or fun = playing games, or fun = the pleasure of gained from an achievement. For my Primary age pupils, having fun only truly happens if they can feel the sense of achievement gained from working hard at a performance until it sounds as good as possible. They recognise this themselves together as a group, and are likely to spontaneously applaud themselves if they can feel that they are performing well.
I agree Emma. Defining 'fun' is useful here. Laughing and having fun without any direction of purpose is very quickly not fun. Slogging away at something or being ruled by a fierce teacher is also not fun. Humans do not learn if they are not gaining some pleasure from the experience so an element of fun I believe is essential to successful learning. A careful combination of making children feel safe to learn, earning their respect and demonstrating a humourous side to your personality is needed to get children to achieve. My experience with the children I taught a musical to was that they took my discipline seriously because they knew I wanted to get the best out of them. I don't believe you can have real fun without order and discipline. A teacher who is not having success with pupils is either not presenting them with material the children are 1) interested in, 2) too difficult for them or 3) too easy for them or 4) the teacher is not relating to them well enough for them to be able to learn.