[My piano teacher] never seemed to judge me for my mistakes. Instead, he’d try to fix them with me: repeating a three-note phrase, differently each time, trying to get me to unlearn a hand position or habitual movement pattern that was systematically sending my fingers to wrong notes.
I had never thought about wrong notes that way. I had thought that wrong notes came from being “bad at piano” or “not practicing hard enough,” and if you practiced harder the clinkers would go away. But that’s a myth.
In fact, wrong notes always have a cause. An immediate physical cause. Just before you play a wrong note, your fingers were in a position that made that wrong note inevitable. Fixing wrong notes isn’t about “practicing harder” but about trying to unkink those systematically error-causing fingerings and hand motions….
Often, I think mistakes are more like bugs than errors. My clinkers weren’t random; they were in specific places, because I had sub-optimal fingerings in those places. A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn’t getting them wrong at random; there’s something missing in their understanding, like not getting the difference between multiplication and addition. Working generically “harder” doesn’t fix bugs (though fixing bugs does require work).
…These days, learning disabilities are far more highly diagnosed than they used to be. And sometimes I hear the complaint about rich parents, “Suddenly if your kid’s getting B’s, you have to believe it’s a learning disability. Nobody can accept that their kid is just plain mediocre. Are there no stupid people left?” And maybe there’s something to the notion that the kid who used to be just “stupid” or “not a great student” is now often labeled “learning disabled.” But I want to complicate that a little bit.
Thing is, I’ve worked with learning disabled kids. There were kids who had trouble reading, kids who had trouble with math, kids with poor fine motor skills, ADD and autistic kids, you name it. And these were mostly pretty mild disabilities. These were the kids who, in decades past, might just have been C students, but whose anxious modern-day parents were sending them to special programs for the learning disabled.
But what we did with them was nothing especially mysterious or medical. We just focused, carefully and non-judgmentally, on improving their areas of weakness. The dyslexics got reading practice. The math-disabled got worksheets and blocks to count. Hyperactive kids were taught to ask themselves “How’s my motor running today?” and be mindful of their own energy levels and behavior. The only difference between us and a “regular” school is that when someone was struggling, we tried to figure out why she was struggling and fix the underlying problem, instead of slapping her a bad report card and leaving it at that.
And I have to wonder: is that “special education” or is it just education?
Maybe nobody’s actually stupid. Maybe the distinction between “He’s got a learning disability” and “He’s just lousy at math” is a false one. Maybe everybody should think of themselves as having learning disabilities, in the sense that our areas of weakness need to be acknowledged, investigated, paid special attention, and debugged.
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