(Shared from an experience I recorded three years ago…but a lesson I continue to relearn over and over again!)
If there is one outstanding thing I have learned from the experience of taking Feldenkrais into the classroom and teaching studio for musicians, it’s that telling students what to do, or even what it is that you think they are doing wrong is never the way to get them to improve. Moreover, doing this very often creates new, unwanted problems, because what I see as a teacher is sometimes just the tip of the iceberg, often very different from what the student perceives, it is always just words and not experience, and it never gives the student a chance to really attend to what they are ACTUALLY doing, which covers so much beyond what ANY teacher can observe.
Well, today, as often is the case, I went against my better judgment on that one just to save time (and regretted it immediately). My high school student was playing a bowing study with multiple string crossings, and I noticed that he struggled in one particular area of the bow and in one bowing direction to include his upper arm in reaching the higher strings, making the crossings angular and uneven. I had him revise the study just to isolate that part of the bow and compare it to the sound and feeling of smoothness elsewhere in the bow, but he continued to move farther and farther away from what I had in mind as the “solution”. Finally, I gave in and said, “You are not dropping your elbow continuously when you move to the higher string as you approach the frog. You think you are doing this, but it’s really your hand that is descending so that your wrist is getting stuck in extreme flexion.” I even demonstrated this to make my point clearer and showed him what the smoothly descending elbow would look like and how it affected the sound and clarity of rhythm.
The moment he tried to reproduce this in interpretation of what he heard me say and saw me do, trying to find it in his own sense, I knew I had made a mistake! The awkwardness of trying to superimpose something verbal and visual onto something that was already not clear in himself was so obvious. He literally did exactly what I said by lowering his elbow, but now increased the tension in his thorax, hand, and neck.
I could not help laughing, and when he asked me if it was at him, I said, “No, it’s because I’m an idiot!” I told him what I believed about learning, and that it was against my better judgement to ever tell a student what to do, and how he just illustrated perfectly brilliantly why it doesn’t work.
I said in the spirit of giving it a second chance, to please forget what I said and imagine instead that he had a tiny little guy sitting on his sternum. I asked him to play the passage again and to see if he could trace the movement of the guy there while he moved between the strings in each part of the bow. Did he move up and down, forward and back, side to side? What was the shape of his path? When he paid attention to his sternum, he started to soften in his ribs and neck and his sternum started to make a very soft and small undulation. I had him also try the same lifting the guy on the sternum up to look a bit towards the ceiling, and then again with him looking a bit down toward the floor, and then to go back to just observing him again. Quite quickly his shoulder released and he made perfectly fluid, even string crossings.
He said, “Well, how do you like that? The little guy on my sternum knows more than anyone!”