Flipping Switches

The dangers of incredibly effective solutions

When I was about 13, my trumpet teacher told me something that turned an impossible task into an easy one right away.

Sometimes you have to sight transpose. The piece might be written for an instrument in C (like a piano) but trumpets are in B-flat, so you have to play everything one step higher than usual. It’s tough if you have never done it before. It takes too much time to recategorize every note on the fly. But it’s also pretty common. You get used to it after doing it enough times.

But once I had to transpose something that was two steps up, and I felt like I was a beginner again. The music was moving too fast – I couldn’t process the notes. Zane had an easy solution. “You play the piano, right? Just pretend you’re reading bass clef.” As it turns out, the notes are exactly the same! With that one mental shift, I was instantly able to play everything two steps up.

That is a dream sequence for teachers and students alike: 1) The student can’t do something. 2) The teacher says something briefly. 3) The student can do the thing now. It’s like you’re in a room that’s pitch black, and then somebody hits the light switch and suddenly you can see all of the objects in the room.

It happens in test prep sometimes. A student will tell me she is “bad at grammar” because she “never learned the rules.” She might cite the semicolon as an example of something she doesn’t understand, leading to many wrong answers. I tell her some variation of “a semicolon separates two complete sentences,” and suddenly, it seems like she can get every semicolon question right.

It’s a satisfying experience for both of us, but it’s also very unusual. And if you treat it like it is normal, looking for light switches to flip at every opportunity, your students won’t improve very much.

In that dark-room-light-switch scenario, the switch did not actually create the objects in the room. Flipping the switch was important, but only because those other (more important) elements already existed.

Similarly, Zane’s transposition trick was incredibly helpful, but only because I already had the skills to play the trumpet and read music. If I needed to play higher or with a better tone, the trick would be useless. And, in fact, most of our lessons and my assignments focused on actual trumpet skills – playing higher and faster with a nicer tone, better phrasing, and more rhythmic precision.

There are no shortcuts to these goals. I spent well over a thousand hours just playing long tones – one note, for at least eight beats at a time. And not just playing it while watching a football game or whatever. I had to imagine the sound I wanted, play it, listen while I played, think about it, and then try again. It’s a very long, effortful process. And that’s just for the tone!

The students who benefit from my semicolon-teaching wizardry have already done most of the work themselves: they’ve read a lot. As a result, crucially, they can identify a complete sentence. So when I say “a semicolon separates two complete sentences,” they simply need to look for something they already know.

But some students can’t identify complete sentences consistently, and for them, my advice is not very helpful. I also don’t have a pithy rule for understanding difficult paragraphs or solving algebraic equations. These are complex skills that can’t be acquired through tricks. They take a lot of time and effort to master.

These skills are also not clean, binary entities: it’s not like you know it or you don’t know it, as in the case of my semicolon rule or Zane’s transposition trick. You may have it to a certain degree. Or you may know it in certain circumstances. So you have to explore the edges of your murky knowledge – what do you know? what can you learn on your own? what do you need help with? – and report back to your teacher. It’s a lot of practice, with a little bit of guidance from an expert.

I think we are all comfortable explaining this harsh truth to a student: Sorry, there are no shortcuts! Sadly, this same truth applies to us teachers. That perfect formula sheet? Those great analogies? Those concise explanations? None of them will carry your student from ignorance to knowledge. And if you both don’t realize that, you’ll just be flipping switches in empty rooms.