Journal · On Teaching
The Teacher's Responsibility
A student arrives knowing almost nothing — and hands the teacher their dream. Everything after that rests on whether the teacher is worthy of the trust.
A student hands you their dream and their years. The whole of a teacher's responsibility begins with being honest enough to deserve them.
Studying a musical instrument is a long and deep process. It involves dreams and fears, frustration and excitement, and when it is taken seriously it demands real devotion to the process. Students usually arrive with little or no knowledge — of the instrument itself, and of what serious study even asks of them. So they must trust the teacher to lead them through the journey, and to give them the right tools to make their dream real, to the very best of his ability.
That trust is the beginning of everything. And it places a weight on the teacher that I don’t think is spoken about nearly enough.
Middle Eastern percussion has changed enormously in the last decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century it was widely considered a “simple” task — left to people who had no need to be real musicians. In the earliest days it was even left to slaves: to keep the oosool, the steady rhythmic cycle, while the “real” musicians played the melodic instruments.
In recent years the whole field has made a quantum leap — into high artistry, into a craft that demands true dedication, practice, and knowledge. But that change has not reached everywhere. And most people in the world cannot tell whether the teacher in front of them is skilled or not — whether he has truly educated himself, or not.
Take a classical music conservatory, anywhere in the world. Literally anywhere. No piano teacher would even consider teaching there without at least a decade of serious study and practice behind him. It is simply unheard of. And the academies? Nobody would dare apply to teach without having spent a great part of his life sitting behind the instrument, day after day.
Why? Because everyone understands that it is a serious, challenging, and deep endeavour. Everyone recognises it. In the percussion field, that is still not the case.
There are people bluffing their way into institutions, or selling online courses wrapped in hollow words about spirituality and growth — words that cover for their own lack of devotion to the craft they claim to teach. Words that cover an inability to hold time. A simple lack of knowledge, and of training.
There is room for everything, as long as there is transparency. If a person wants to teach others to play, he must be honest about what he is — and about what he is not. If he cannot give a student proper technical foundations, because his own technique lacks the very thing he is meant to pass on; if he cannot hold a rhythmic cycle; if he cannot teach the evolution of deep practice because he has never lived through it himself — then it has to be said. Clearly.
There are so many people carrying bad musical habits from bad teachers. So many. People who now have to work twice as hard to peel off years of wrong education — frustrated, slowly realising they spent years studying without ever really evolving. Why? Because the one guiding them had not evolved either.
If every sentence your teacher speaks is not backed by hundreds of hours of playing — you should run away.
Maybe he can teach you spirituality, or self-development. Possibly. But he will not teach you to play the drum properly — because that knowledge is not built from words. It is built from time at the instrument, and there is no shortcut around it, and no sentence that can stand in for it.
And then there is the other side — what a real teacher actually is.
A real teacher must be willing to share everything he knows with his students. Everything. He has to understand, deeply, that the music was never his to begin with. That one day he will die, and the music will remain. That his students are the carriers of the music — and that this is exactly how deep traditions are built, handed from one pair of hands to the next.
He must accept the circle of life. Some of his students will outgrow him — and they will outgrow him precisely because he saved them all the time he once spent making his own mistakes. That should bring him joy, not envy. A real teacher offers love and generosity. He does not envy his students, and he does not ask to be worshipped as an idol.
And he never — never — hides anything from them out of fear. If you hide “secrets” from your student, you have poisoned the water at the spring of music. And the music will not forgive you.
The teacher’s task is to make the student devote themselves to their own journey. He carries a share of their dream. And to carry it well, he has to find the deepest generosity inside himself — and keep giving from it until there is nothing left to hide.
Without knowledge, spirit is a hollow wind. Without spirit, knowledge is a barren tree. A real teacher owes a student both — and the honesty to admit which one he is missing.
Explore the Classes →Curious where you’d begin? Start the free Groove Builder Challenge →
Live online lessons across four instruments. Keep reading: Discipline Is a Skill · Poetry Over Speed · The Dream That Was Never Mine