Getting kids to play things that are too hard for them...

I know it's not very PC to say but sometimes I could throttle my students. Here we are in an african drumming for schools workshop and it's all going nicely, then I throw in a relatively simple phrase and watch in horror as everyone plays something completely different. I play a simple phrase like "B.TTTTT.B.TTTTT" and then watch as they play the bass, then waggle their hands around on the edge of the drum for a bit, then play another bass...

Workshops can be stressful at times and its easy to blame your students, but just as a bad workman blames his tools, a bad teacher blames his students. After pondering this for a while I decided to slow the phrase right down in my next workshop. I discovered, of course, that played slowly enough even year 1s could play it. I started off really really slow (about 40 beats a minute) then gradually increased the speed and nearly every child played it perfectly! It wasn't that they couldn't play it, it was just that they weren't capable of understanding it when I played it fast. It was as if their brains just registered "fast hands" rather that actually hearing how many notes I'd played.

And this led to a small revelation for me. Maybe when people can't do things its my fault. Yes I can be very self-deprecating at times but what if people could play almost anything if you presented it in the right way? What if my low expectations, and limits I placed on what people could and couldn't do, actually became self fulfilling?

So I started trying other things that I thought were too difficult for people. I started teaching my beginners groups to play rolls in their first few weeks of drumming. Here's an example of the way I teach rolls:

I noticed when I went to djembe fola workshops around the country that whenever the teacher presents a phrase with a roll in it people often try to put more rolls in there than the teacher actually plays. Just like the kids its as if their brains are just registering "really fast hands" rather than what is actually played. Ironically because they perceive something difficult they make it more difficult than it is!

Spurred on by these successes I was feeling like I was in a rut with a workshop of year 4s a couple of months ago, so I just threw in some things that most people would think were too difficult to try with kids:

I gave a break with Son Clave in it. Son Clave is a very syncopated pattern that adults often struggle with. I found to my delight that as long as they clapped it or played flams, so they were using both hands as one, they played it easily. I really mean easily. Everyone. Every kid in the room! Clearly the 'problem' I was having before was one of 'perception' and 'manual coordination': if I try to get them to play it hand-to-hand in any way they're all over the place...they can't decode what my hands are doing because it's all too fast and then can't control their hands to play it.

The take home message here is that kids as young as year 1 and 2 implicitly understand Son Clave. As long as you don't try to explain it or tell them its difficult you're fine! Kids don't intellectualize things like adults often do so they don't even try to 'understand it'. They just play it.

Then I took it even further and asked my dundun player to play 'Soli', a highly syncopated 12/8 rhythm, whilst getting the kids to swap between clapping the two polyrhythmic pulses (4s and 3s). That's bloody hard that is but guess what? Year 4s could do it easily. My gast was flabbered.

It seems that you can easily get kids to play things that are too hard for them as long as you present them in the right way!

And remember: A bad teacher always blames his students!