All Hail the Metronome

Sometimes, teaching kids makes me want to put my head through a wall. I’m not talking math or science, either. That stuff is easy. Even the slowest kids will understand multiplication after a good tutoring session. I can teach almost anyone anything. I have a shortcut for almost every type of problem. Give me an hour with a D student, and he’ll start understanding how to multiply fractions or solve for x. 5^th graders are annoying, bratty, and unusually idiotic. But they’re also pretty darn smart, and a good tutor can usually help them out.

But when you put an instrument in their hands, they suddenly turn into three-year-olds.

We sit in the library (the band room is taken). For half an hour, I sit with a young boy with short blonde hair and blue eyes you would see right out of a movie. He’s quiet, and he holds his trombone as if the inanimate object is going to jump and bite him. I can almost immediately tell his issue. As with most kids just starting out, he struggles with confidence. Our first few sessions focused on breathing correctly, tonguing, and perfecting the correct slide positions. He’s good, I note, and has real promise. But despite all my praise and all our practice, he pauses before every note. He doesn’t say it, but I know his problem. He doesn’t want to be wrong.

After him, the next child comes in, from the same 5th-grade class. She’s bouncy, full of energy, and is quick to talk my ear off. She slaps her trombone pieces together. I wince as she drops her mouthpiece onto the carpeted floor. For thirty minutes, her leg bounces up and down. Her fingers constantly fiddle with the slide lock. When I ask her to play a B flat, she blows so much air into the trombone that it sounds like a foghorn. While my ears are still ringing, she turns to me with an upturned eyebrow and a smile. She doesn’t seem to notice that she didn’t manage to play the correct note.

With her, things are more difficult. Her homeroom teacher says she struggles with ADD. The band director warns me that she is a struggle to teach. My friend, now a senior and the lead trombone now that I had graduated, laughs, and says he’s glad he doesn’t have to teach such a difficult student.

But that’s not to say she is bad; on the contrary, she’s better than my other student in some respects. She is not afraid to try new notes. He is too nervous to go faster than 40 BPM. She is friendly, going as far as to share her snacks after our sessions. He simply nods after we finish and is quick to go out the door. She plays. He doesn’t.

The one thing they have in common is that neither of them can count.

Trombones—especially 5th-grade trombones—have it easy. Most notes are whole notes, where the player simply holds a C or D for 4 counts. Everything else is a half note, a simple 2 counts, or the occasional quarter note (a short 1 count). Very rarely will a 5^th grader have to play an eighth note, and never will they have to play anything faster.

Unfortunately, my two trombonists cannot seem to count to 4.

The boy stutters and stumbles before every note he plays. I clap my hands, audibly counting while he plays ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. One, two, three, four. My voice and his barely audible notes are the only noises in the library. His right hand jerkily moves up and down the slide. I could imagine the gears turning inside his head, debating on whether or not he should go to 4^th or 6^th position.

Meanwhile, the girl moves far too fast. Her slide goes flying off the instrument—the fabled 8^th position—and smacks onto the bookworm plush on the floor. She laughs and picks it back up, only to do the exact same thing again. I did the same thing I had done with the boy, counting each note slowly. The girl doesn’t seem to hear. I turn my back for one second to open the metronome app on my phone. Somehow, in those few moments where I wasn’t looking, she had opened a pack of crackers and was digging in.

These sessions go on for months. I schedule my time with them in between my college exams. For weeks, there is no change. The boy still can’t play. The girl still plays too much. Neither of them seems to understand the gentle ‘dut dut dut’ of the metronome. I have never struggled to tutor anyone as much as these two. I get to our lessons a few minutes early, racking my brain to think of anything new I could try. But there’s nothing. I’m completely at a loss.

I am forced to swallow a very painful pill. These kids may be unteachable. There are only a few more weeks in the school year. Soon my lessons with them will come to an end.

I’d never not had a student improve. I’d had a spotless tutoring record. I banged my head against the metal music stand. Maybe I had lost my touch since graduating. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to teach anymore.

I heard footsteps outside the library door. I sat up, plastering on a fake smile to welcome in the boy. But there was something different about him today. Or maybe there had been something different about him for a while, but I just didn’t care to notice.

5^th graders are not known for their great posture, yet the boy was standing straight up. He immediately sat his trombone case on the ground and handed me his concert music. I wasn’t used to the forwardness but started the lesson as usual. He still stumbles. He’s not moving as fast as he should. Then again, he is only a beginner. I clap my hands to the beat, and he follows along. Slowly, but surely. He finishes the piece and looks over at me with a little smile. Because he knows he did it right.

The girl is next. She’s still bubbly, still far too talkative. However, when she goes to sit down, she gets quiet. We play the same concert piece from before. My ears don’t ring so badly by the time we finish. The girl chews the inside of her cheek and points to a note on the page. ‘I know I didn’t play that right,’ she says. ‘Which one is that again?’ I correct her, and we play again, the metronome accompanying the two of us.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. They both are still awful. Like, painfully bad. I’m sure their parents wish they had never picked up an instrument. But really, had I been any better? Had I not done the same thing, playing so loud that the foundation of my house shook?

I bid the girl farewell, turning my metronome off. The library was back to its usual quiet serenity. I begin to take my trombone apart and put it back in its case.

They sucked. Really bad. But they’d get better. All they needed was time.