I always return to the passage below by Richard Feynman when explaining why teaching plays a central role in my life satisfaction and mental/musical well-being.
Just a few years ago, as I stumbled out into the great post-graduate unknown, self-confidence lurching, I wondered if I would have things to say if, for instance, I were invited to teach a harp masterclass somewhere. Or would it just be, like, really awkward. *clears throat* “Hmm, well, practice some more? Alrighty… Um, next?” I’d always found it challenging to formulate my impressions into immediate constructive feedback during studio classes.
But now, not only have I become quite assured that I do have a lot of insight to offer my students, I more often find myself thinking, “Wow, I have so much more I can offer you whenever you decide to actually apply yourself and reach for your potential.” (…And yes, I’ve been known to express this sentiment out loud. 🤗)
Certainly I encounter new situations and new learning styles that challenge and grow my pedagogical ability. And always I’m grasping for better ways to communicate ideas. But those challenges differ categorically from feeling that I’m near my perceptual limit—that place where I wouldn’t be able to identify the next thing that my student should do to improve their artistry. Somewhat to my younger self’s surprise, I find I’m not near that limit.
Anyway. All that to say: it’s a good thing that teaching the basics again and again brings me a lot of joy.
Obviously, harp and physics aren’t comparable fields. Yet I find so many parallels between Feynman’s attraction to teaching and my own. Aside from the existential justification that teaching provides, answering the unexpected questions of beginners often causes me to deeply consider the mechanics of my own sound production. And, moreover, teaching is about being in contact with things—the material, the problems, the ideas.
“I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, ‘At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution’—it’s just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say ‘I’m teaching my class.’
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
—Richard Feynman, Surely You’e Joking, Mr. Feynman!
There’s one more element that Feynman doesn’t mention in his valuation of teaching the basics but plays a large role in mine: witnessing the thrill of discovery in someone else’s eyes.