Adding Value to the Education System
Recently I’ve been talking to some of my education friends about whether or not our own college experiences prepared us for our roles as high school teachers and musicians in general. I’ve also asked them if the current education system is actually serving our students. On both account the consensus is no. All of us agreed that SOME of what we learned in college is useful now as a teacher and we agree that a SMALL part of the current education system is helpful however, there is a lot of room for improvement.
Hopefully this isn’t shocking news. Especially when it comes to what our students are learning in school, we’ve all felt for a long time that it isn’t preparing them for the “real world.” I am, however, shocked to find how little of what we learned in college is helpful now. There are simply so many aspects that were either never covered, or covered so briefly they have long been forgotten. The system is also vastly different now. If you’ve been out of college for more than ten years large parts of what we learned our simply out of date.
This all being said, I’ve been asking myself “How can I truly add value to what my students are learning?” and “Is there something I could do to help the next generation of educators?” I believe the answer is yes.
Throughout the rest of the year I’ll be rolling out some resources I think will help add value to high school and college students and current/future educators. I certainly don’t have all the answers and some ideas might not work for everyone but we have to try something.
The upcoming resources will include this blog. I’m not locking myself into a specific amount of them but I’m expecting at least one a month and helpfully more at times. For students we’ll cover topics specifically linked to your career as a musician: how to prep for gigs, how to find gigs, how to prepare for a recital (if you’re a college student), intermediate concepts for guitar, learning advanced rep, etc. For college students I’ll be talking a lot about how to survive music school, the things that will actually be useful, the things you don’t need to worry so much about and how to set yourself up for a successful career. And for the young educators I’ll discuss things like resume/cv building, interview prep, surviving year one, and the things you’ll probably want to know going into your first few years as an educator.
I’ll be releasing a lot of guitar/bass specific material this year including (hopefully) a few books of advanced concepts, more social media content and a discord server where we can have listening sessions, real time Q&A’s and eventually monthly masterclasses on a wide variety of topics.
I’m excited to share what I have prepared but remember, the whole point of all of this is to help you reach whatever goals you have as a musician and educator. I have a long list of things to talk about however, what makes this most effective is answering the direct questions you have. I would much rather answer questions than blindly talk into the abyss so please let me know what you want, musician, student or teacher related.
Until next time,
Heard
