Joy
Let’s acknowledge a tricky truth: people won’t continue doing what they don’t enjoy. And anyone who has spent more than a week playing an instrument or learning to sing knows that the world of learning to make music isn’t always a barrel of laughs.
But that doesn’t mean that the majority of music learning should be drudgery. That is simply not sustainable. Enjoyment in work is something that all humans are built to have. Really joyous people can do repetitive things with a smile and without inward grumbling.
Do a little thought experiment with me right now. Imagine working on a project with three other people.
One of your groupmates is all bright sunshine, all the time. They refuse to ever see the negative in anything and seem to work overtime to bring up the energy the group with compliments, excited banter, and unbridled enthusiasm about the project. Being around them feels like constantly having a cheerleader at your shoulder; at best, it can be motivating, but often, it’s exhausting.
In stark contrast, the second group member doesn’t want to do a lick of work—and lets everyone know it. They are mad about being in the group, constantly expressing how worthless they feel the project is. Although they do the work, they complain incessantly and leave the whole environment around them feeling heavy.
The third person in the group is different. While they bring energy to the group and can compellingly communicate the value of the project, they also acknowledge that some parts of the project feel pointless or mundane. Despite this, they work hard and ungrumblingly choose to have fun. While they work, they treat every other person in the group with respect and bring some humor to the work. Being around this person makes you feel like time is flying. When problems come up, you find yourself going to them. You know that they will be honest and empathize with your frustrations but will also bring their stamina and intelligence to the table in order to figure out a solution.
This third person has resilience, honesty, and humor. They choose to create their own joy and don’t look for it outside of themselves—either by forcing the people around them to be happy or by insisting that the work they do be inherently enjoyable.
What if you could help your students be this third person?
Joy in Action
Lou was totally unprepared for his lesson. We’d been working on some pretty advanced musical theory, and his assignment the previous week had been to make copies of flashcards with key terms and work on them. Yet as he opened his bag, there was the packet of notecards I had given him, not only unwritten on but still wrapped in their plastic.
This surprised me. I knew this kid; he was talented and smart. He also had an innate curiosity, and he wasn’t afraid of hard work. So when he showed up to lessons without knowing the material, I realized that something was wrong.
I took an educated guess. As a super-intelligent, talented kid, he always had a lot of work to do. I wasn’t the only one who saw his potential; he was in many music ensembles at school and around his community. He was in all advanced academic classes with hours of homework each night. His family and his teachers expected the best and the most out of him, including me. Now, as he was staring longingly at his Nintendo Switch, I knew that his flashcards weren’t undone because he was lazy or unmotivated. He was just dying to have some fun.
So, I made a choice. The “play” mechanism so important to learning is easily activated and can re-energize weary students. Enjoying hard work is something that my student Lou needed to learn.
“Hey Lou,” I say, “Stand up for a minute?”
He stands, and I move the piano bench he’d been sitting on to the middle of the room.
“What are you doing, Miss Allison?”
“Getting set up,” I say to him. “Here’s the deal. We’re going to go through these flashcards.” I take the pre-made flashcards he was meant to copy out of his bag and tap them on my knee to make them straight.
He grimaces a little. “I don’t really know them yet, Miss Allison.”
“I know,” I say to him, with a shrug and a smile to let him know I’m not mad. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to say the word, and you say the definition. Do your best—most of these you’ve heard before. If you don’t know it for sure, just guess.”
He sighs. “Okay.”
“But we have to get through all of these flashcards in three minutes,” I say, offhandedly.
Now I’ve got his attention. It’s totally arbitrary, a three-minute time limit. But he’s all mine now.
“Three minutes?!” he says. “But there’s gotta be, like, a hundred flashcards in there!”
“I’m up for it—are you?” I ask, challenging him.
He laughs under his breath and says, “Well, okay.”
I say to my phone, “Set my timer for three minutes.” As the clock starts to go, we’re facing off. Ten, twenty, thirty cards go by. Every once in a while, I will loudly read the countdown.
“Two minutes, thirty seconds!” I yell.
I see a wave of nervous but fun energy run through him. He has to define “andante,” but now that I’ve made him nervous, he stutters. “Uh, uh, uh, ‘walking speed’!’” he shouts.
We rip through those cards. His shoulders are up and his head vibrates with anticipation for every card, like he’s trying to rattle knowledge back into place. We have a blast, tripping over tricky words and feeling the pressure of every flub as the timer on my phone ticks away the seconds. He is focused. He is happy.
The one thing he isn’t doing now is staring at his Nintendo Switch.
As teachers, we get to create music makers who find fun in the mundane. We can redefine something as painful as practicing into an enjoyable challenge.
There is so much more to say about joy in music. It’s a big topic that I will cover in depth in Chapter 13; for now, the important thing to note is that time spent teaching joyful work is never wasted—it will give you bigger returns than anything else you do with your students.
Because people love doing things that they enjoy.
If we don’t create joyful musicians, we could end up:
Making people believe that it doesn’t matter how you feel while you work. This leads to burn out, stress, and illness.
Teaching people that work isn’t supposed to be enjoyed. This leaves people with the feeling that their lives will be mostly spent doing what they don’t want to do or feeling guilty if they do find work they love.
What we gain from creating joyful musicians
When a music student learns how to love the hard work of music making, they can:
Transfer the skill of enjoying hard work to their whole lives—relationships, study of other disciplines, work, civic responsibility.
Regulate their own work schedules to avoid burnout and bad work/life balance.
Feel confident about their own ability to start and end a project, no matter what it is, because they can find the enjoyment in it.
Have assurance that no matter what work they choose to do, they will enjoy their lives.