“Nobody Teaches Guitar Like That Anymore” — He’d Been Teaching for 55 Years

“Nobody Teaches Guitar Like That Anymore” — He’d Been Teaching for 55 Years

October 8th, 2019. Hackney, East London. The Eastwood Music Academy, Dalston Lane, 10 past 10:00 in the morning. The school occupied the ground floor and part of the first floor of a converted Victorian terrace that had been, in the 90 years since its construction, a haberdashery, a printing business, a social club of some kind.

And then, a series of incrementally more niche commercial tenants before the previous owner had taken out the load-bearing walls and put in the soundproof practice rooms and the reception desk and the notice board covered in concert listings and student achievements and the occasional lost and found notice for a metronome or a capo.

Through the practice room doors, on this particular Tuesday morning, came the muffled sounds of the building’s working day. Something picked haltingly on an acoustic guitar, a piano phrase repeated, a voice counting time above the click of a metronome. The school had been called the Eastwood Music Academy since 1987, when the current owner’s predecessor had taken it over and changed the name from something nobody now remembered.

The current owner was a woman named Patricia who had been running it since 2012 and who had the specific qualities of a small business owner who has made something work for 7 years in a neighborhood where things frequently do not work for 7 years. Patience, attention to the specific gravity of each individual client relationship, and the ability to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously without letting them resolve too quickly into a decision that she might later need to reverse.

The waiting area was four chairs and a coffee table with a guitar magazine from 3 months ago and a plant that was doing better than it had any right to be given the light. One of the four chairs was occupied this morning by a man with long silver-white hair and a dark coat who had come in at 5:10 and been told by the reception assistant that Patricia would be with him shortly.

He had sat down without complaint and had taken out his phone and appeared to be reading something on it. He was 75 years old. He was here because Patricia had emailed him 2 weeks earlier about a 1957 Martin 018 that had come in as part of a bequest from the estate of a former student and that Patricia had felt, based on a conversation with a mutual acquaintance, he might want to see before it went to auction.

 He had said he would come by. The assistant had not asked his name. The office was adjacent to the waiting area, separated by a wall with a glass upper panel, the kind of glass that was partially frosted for privacy, but that did not prevent a conversation conducted above a certain volume from being heard by someone sitting 4 ft away in the waiting area.

This channel exists for the offices adjacent to the waiting rooms and for the conversations you cannot help but hear. Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. Arthur Cole was 72 years old and had been teaching guitar for 55 years. He had started at 17, giving lessons to three students in his parents’ front room in Tottenham, charging two shillings per half hour because that was what the mother of the first student had offered and he had not known to say more.

He had been teaching in one form or another ever since in schools, in music centers, in community halls, in the back rooms of guitar shops, and for the last 16 years at the Eastwood Music Academy, where he came on Tuesdays and Thursdays and taught six students per day from 9:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon.

His method was what it had always been. He did not use backing tracks or practice apps or online tuning tools or the various digital aids that had become the furniture of contemporary music education. He taught by ear first, not as a philosophical position exactly, but because it was how he had learned, and because he had taught enough students over enough decades to have developed a settled view about the sequence in which things needed to be introduced.

 The ear first, the hand second, the notation third, when the student could already hear what the notation was saying. He could teach a student to find a note by ear before they could name it, which some of his colleagues considered impractical, and which Arthur considered the only way to build a player rather than someone who could execute instructions.

He taught slowly. This was not a criticism, but a description, and it was not same as teaching without urgency. It was teaching with a different relationship to time, the relationship of someone who understands that the body needs to learn at a different rate from the mind, and that rushing the body produces a kind of playing that looks like it works until the student is under any pressure, at which point it doesn’t.

He spent a long time on single notes before he introduced chords. He spent a long time on chords before he introduced scales. He required students to play a phrase correctly three times in a row before they moved on, not the third time correctly, which anyone can manage by concentrating hard enough once, but three consecutive correct times, which is a different standard entirely, and one that builds a relationship between the hand and the phrase that persists under conditions of nervousness and speed and distraction.

Some students found this frustrating and left. The ones who stayed found that 6 months in they could play things they had not expected to be able to play for years, and that they could play them reliably, which is a different thing from being able to play them when everything is calm. He was sitting in the chair across Patricia’s desk at 10 past 10, and he had been sitting there for 4 minutes, and he knew from the quality of the conversation that it was going that way again.

Sophie Park was 28 years old and had been the academy’s business and curriculum manager for 11 months. She had come from an educational technology company in Shoreditch, where she had helped design and roll out a music learning platform used by 42 schools across three London boroughs, and she had brought with her a specific view of how music education should function in the current environment.

 A view that involved learning apps, structured digital curricula, measurable outcome data, and the kind of streamline lesson structure that produced demonstrable skill development on a defined timeline that parents could follow and schools could report on. She had reorganized the curriculum documentation in her first month, improved the student retention tracking in her second, and introduced three new teachers who used the integrated digital teaching platform the academy had adopted in January.

She was good at her job in the ways the job was currently defined. And she was applying those definitions with the thoroughness of someone who believes that thoroughness, applied to the right framework, produces the right outcomes. “The issue isn’t the quality of what Arthur delivers,” Sophie said, which was the sentence that preceded the thing she actually meant.

“The issue is the format. Parents are asking for a curriculum they can track. They want to see their child progress through defined stages. They want progress reports that correspond to measurable benchmarks. Arthur’s approach doesn’t generate that kind of data. We can’t show a parent what their child has learned in the last 6 months in a way they can evaluate.

Patricia looked at her. Parents are also asking about the waiting list for Arthur’s slots, Patricia said. It’s 7 months. The other teachers are 3 to 4 weeks. Because he has a reputation that predates the current parent demographic, Sophie said. The parents who put their children on that list are mostly referrals from previous students.

 The new intake people who are finding us through online search, they’re looking for what all the comparable schools offer, digital integration, app-based practice tools, progress frameworks. She paused. Nobody teaches guitar like that anymore. The methodology is from another era.

 The students who thrive with it are the exceptions. We can’t build a curriculum around the exceptions. In the waiting area, the man with the silver-white hair had stopped reading his phone. Arthur had been listening with the expression of someone who has heard a version of this conversation many times over many years in many different offices, and who has developed over those years a settled relationship with the specific quality of the silence that follows it.

He was not angry. He was not defending himself because he had also learned over many years that the defense that worked was not the verbal one. “May I ask,” he said, “what the progress data would need to show?” Sophie began to explain the digital curriculum framework. In the waiting area, the man set his phone on his knee and looked at the glass panel in the wall.

Then he stood up. He knocked once on the office door. He opened it slightly. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. His voice was quiet and even. He looked at Patricia. “I couldn’t help hearing the conversation.” He looked at Sophie. “I wonder if I might say something.” Patricia looked at him. Sophie looked at him. Arthur looked at him.

The man with the silver-white hair and the dark coat came into the office and sat in the chair beside Arthur without being invited to. The way someone sits in a room where they have identified where they need to be. “I’ve been playing guitar since 1956,” he said. “I’ve had teachers and I’ve learned without teachers and I’ve watched how other people play for 60 years.

 The method you’re describing,” he looked at Arthur, “the ear before the notation, the three consecutive correct repetitions, the long time on a single note.” He looked at Sophie. “That’s not a methodology from another era. That’s what produces a musician rather than a person who can execute a curriculum.” Sophie looked at him.

 “With respect, the evidence from comparable programs suggests the evidence from comparable programs measures what comparable programs measure,” the man said. He said it without particular emphasis, the way you state a fact about which there is no disagreement to be had. “Progress data shows progress on the metrics the program values.

 If you design the curriculum around the metrics, the data looks good. It doesn’t tell you whether the student can play.” He looked at Arthur. “How long does a student typically spend with you before they can play something from beginning to end without looking at a chart?” Arthur thought about it. “Three months,” he said, “for most students, sometimes four.

” “Three months,” the man repeated to Sophie. He said it as if it were the answer to something that had been in question. “That’s what it takes to build it properly. The students on the seven-month waiting list are there because someone told someone else that in three months their child could actually play. That’s the data.

Have you ever been in a room where someone from outside a system understood it more clearly than the people inside it? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Sophie looked at him. She was trying to place him in the way that people try to place someone when they can feel that the placement matters, but haven’t found it yet.

“Could I ask who you are?” she said. The man looked at her. He had the expression of someone who has been asked this question in enough rooms to have lost the need to manage the moment that follows the answer. He said his name. Sophie was quiet for a moment. She looked at Patricia. Patricia had known, from the moment he sat down in the waiting area, who was sitting in the waiting area, and had been waiting with the specific patience of someone who has decided that the situation will develop in its own way without her assistance.

Arthur looked at the man. He had known for approximately four minutes, since the moment the man had sat down in the chair beside him, and the quality of the room had changed. “You’re on the waiting list,” Arthur said, not a question. The man looked at him. “My nephew,” he said, “since March.” Arthur nodded.

 He looked at his hands on his knees. “The three repetitions,” the man said to Arthur. “I taught myself that way before I knew there was a word for it. Play it once until it’s right, then play it right twice more.” He looked at the wall of the office as though looking at something further away. “Everything I learned that stayed, I learned that way.

” Sophie was looking at the coffee on Patricia’s desk. She was doing the specific arithmetic of someone who has been in a room for the last 40 minutes believing they were the most informed person in it and has just revised that belief. Patricia looked at her. “What would it take?” Patricia said, “to document what Arthur’s students are able to do at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? Not on a framework, on a recording.

” Sophie looked at her. “A recording?” “Of the student playing,” Patricia said, “so the parent can see.” “That’s not,” Sophie began, then she stopped. She thought about it for a moment. “That could work,” she said. It came out less certainly than she had intended, which was more honestly than she had been speaking for the last 40 minutes, which was an improvement.

After the meeting, Arthur walked out to the waiting area. The man with the silver-white hair was sitting down again, looking at his phone. The dark coat folded over the arm of the chair beside him. “Thank you,” Arthur said. The man looked up. “Play the three repetitions,” he said. “Don’t let them take that.” He reached into his coat pocket and held out a guitar pick, dark, worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side.

 “For the students,” he said, “show them what a used pick looks like. It’s useful to know that a pick wears. It tells them something about the angle.” Arthur took it. He looked at it. “I’ve been teaching for 55 years,” Arthur said. “I didn’t expect that to need defending.” “It doesn’t,” the man said simply. “It needs demonstrating, which you’ve been doing for 55 years.

” He stood up and went to find Patricia and the 1957 Martin. The documentation system that Sophie introduced the following month, student recordings at 3-month intervals, did not replace Arthur’s methodology. It recorded what his methodology produced, which turned out to be more persuasive than any framework document, because what it recorded was students who could play.

The recordings went on the academy website. The waiting list became eight months. Arthur retired in 2022 at the age of 74. Not because he had been asked to, and not because he had stopped being able to teach, but because he decided after some months of thinking about it that it was the right time to stop, which is a different reason and a better one.

At his leaving gathering, which was held in the academy’s largest practice room, and attended by 43 former students, most of whom had been teaching guitar themselves for varying numbers of years, several of whom had been teaching for longer than some of the current academy staff had been alive, he played three things.

The last of them was a song he had written in 1971 and had played at the end of every first lesson he had ever given, because he had found over decades of first lessons that it answered the question that every first student always had, which is, “What is this going to sound like when I can do it?” It had always been the right question, and the answer had always been the same.

The pick is in the small wooden tray on his desk at home, where he keeps the things that belong on a desk. He still plays every day, not for students now, for himself, which is how he started in 1964, and which is, he has decided, the right way to finish. If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications.

This channel exists for the 55 years that needed one afternoon to be properly seen. What have you been doing long enough that it stopped needing defense and started needing only demonstration. Tell me below. I read every single comment. Jimmy Page once said, “I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing properly.

” Arthur Cole has played a phrase correctly three consecutive times at the end of every lesson he has ever given. 55 years, thousands of students. That is doing something properly. That is what lasts. See you in the next one.