I’ve tried writing something about this topic 4 or 5 times by now. It’s a tricky subject and one I think about a lot. After all, the goal is to pass on knowledge and wisdom to the students, right? As an added bonus, teaching helps one to understand and perform his or her craft better. I’m constantly analyzing my craft(s) and the ways I can convey concepts to my students. I want them to understand what I’m talking about, and that means I have to understand various teaching methods as well as the nuances of the craft itself.

Now, think about the above generalization. Think about that and then ask yourself, “If I call myself a teacher, am I really teaching?”

Allow me to be cut and dry here.

There’s teaching, teching, and instructing. Which one do you do by default?

Instructing is the base of all three categories. Quite simply, an instructor tells someone what to do. Since this is a drum blog, after all, I’ll “Play that again.” “Go hold a roll.” “Clean up the flams.” This, of course, is drum-related (it’s a drum blog, you know), but you’ve seen the stereotype of a bad teacher on TV: “Open your books to page 94 and start reading to the end of the chapter. Do the questionnaire at the end.” In basic, basic instruction, you can certainly show someone how to do something. Demonstration, for example, is a form of instructing; by demonstrating a method and giving a play-by-play of what you’re doing is basic instruction. Instruction, however, doesn’t always have to contain information other than instructions of what needs to be done.

Teching is the step up. It includes instruction but also offers a bit more information. For me, teching deals with the issues and problems at hand. Techs address these issues, offering both instruction and advice, but generally the lessons given are not global. That is, the lessons aren’t related to other, similar topics both inside and outside of the craft. For example, a tech will help the student fix an accented passage in a piece of music by may not generalize the concepts of playing accents so that the fix can be applied to other, similar situations.

Now, instructing and teching aren’t bad things. In fact, in the medium of competitive drumline, you get a lot of instruction and teching that are very narrow in focus, and depending on the time restraints, sometimes you just have to give instruction and hope that the students trust you know what you’re doing.

The problem is, I often see instructors and techs that default to these methods and still call themselves teachers.

Teaching is the final step up. It includes both teching and instructing, but whenever possible the lessons pertain to both the immediate issue and is also relatable on a global scale. Teachers will take narrowly focused information and offer to their students a way to apply it to other, similar situations. Fixing an accented roll in a passage of music can also have general drumming applications. There are analogous situations, too. I can’t count the number of times I’ve related the discipline of being in a drumline to becoming a disciplined student in school, or how respectful presentation learned in drumline is related to showing up to a job interview.

Global lessons lead to this point: a teacher should be imparting wisdom to the student, and that includes giving the tools to the student so that they will eventually be able to go out and teach themselves different things.

Having said all this, ask yourself again, “Am I a teacher?” If you call yourself a teacher, but the answer, according to what I’ve laid out here, is, “no,” then perhaps you should re-evaluate how you approach your students.