I am a trained musician – I have attained AMEB 8th grade in both classical piano and musical theory. I hold a Bachelor of Music Education. I learnt piano privately for around 15 years and saxophone for several years as well. I would humbly say I am reasonably skilled at playing the piano and keyboards (though my sax playing is somewhat rusty now). However, despite all that musical background, the one thing that has both annoyed and embarrassed me over the years is that I am such a hopeless guitar player!
I bought my first acoustic guitar (a second-hand Ibanez) way back in 1989, as I knew it would be a useful instrument for a music teacher to know, and I learnt some of the easier chords (called “open chords”), but for the life of me, I never really mastered the rest. To rub salt into the wound, around ten years ago I bought a relatively expensive Maton acoustic guitar, somehow thinking that might motivate me more, but it has only made me feel worse for owning an instrument of a quality that I probably don’t deserve.
I shared all of this recently with the secondary school because, inspired by the learning disposition of adaptability, I wanted to show that, like them, I am also on a learning journey. There is much about music and performing that I am comfortable with, but to improve at guitar, I need to adapt some of those skills to a different context: a different way of producing sound and a very different hand position from what I am used to on piano. I am not starting from scratch, but I do need to think quite differently, as I can’t simply assume that I can transfer my skills from one thing to another.
While we as educators can attempt to anticipate the skills and knowledge your children will need for the future, it is their ability to adapt, to pivot, to think creatively, and to approach challenges from new perspectives that will be essential for success in an ever-changing and complex world.
So, now I have skin in the game. I have brought my guitar into my office and committed to practising it on a couple of mornings a week before school. I also told the students that I would return to the assembly at times during the year to show them my progress.
As we encourage the learning dispositions in our students, let’s model them as adults too. May our homes and classrooms be places where flexibility and adaptability are not feared but embraced, where growth is valued more than perfection, and where we trust God to lead us, even when the path takes a different turn from what we expected.
Mr David Stonestreet
Principal
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