The right units
We’ve cultivated ornamental cherry trees for the beauty of their blossoms, not for their fruits. (Image by Couleur)
Over the last month of my study of French, some things are clicking that have never clicked before.
Instead of studying words, I’m studying sentences. That is making a huge difference.
For instance, I learned an important word that I somehow never noticed before — “ce que.” It did not appear on any vocab lists in my four years of high school French and it was not taught explicitly in any of the books, audio or video programs I’ve perused as an adult. But it’s kind of important. It basically just means “what,” as in “C’est ce que j’ai dit” (“That’s what I said”) or “C’est ce que je veux dire” (“That’s what I mean”). (My French-speaking readers can correct me if I’m off the mark here!)
I knew how to use ce que to ask questions (for instance, as part of est-ce que or qu’est-ce que), but I didn’t get it. I needed to see this “ce que” in fifty different contexts, doing its job. I needed to see that “ce que” represented an idea, even though it is made up of two little parts and didn’t register as a "word” to my English-speaking brain. I had to let go of learning French words and begin focusing on ideas. And now, a whole world is opening up.
I’ve realized that it’s not important to map each French word to its English equivalent. Instead, what I need to be able to do to understand and speak the language is express an idea. Now that I’m looking for whole clumps of words that express an idea, things are going a lot faster.
The same idea exists in music. We think that we need to teach individual notes, learning them all and then reading them one by one, decoding, naming, and playing. Unfortunately, that sets people up for a lifetime of plodding and plunking, never to develop the musicality to express themselves on the instrument.
What we must do instead is teach musical ideas. Consider the playground melody, “na na na na boo boo, you can’t catch me.” This consists of three tones, sol, mi, and la (or the fifth, third, and sixth tones of the scale respectively). Learn how to find sol mi and la on your instrument, and then play them in different patterns: sol mi, sol mi sol, sol la sol, sol sol mi, and so on. Within minutes, I’ll be able to sing you a short pattern with these three notes and you’ll be able to play it back to me by ear. You’ll be able to work out the playground chant plus “Rain Rain Go Away” and most of “Ring Around the Rosy.” From there, you can learn two more tones to complete the pentatonic scale, which will allow you to play hundreds of melodies from around the world such as “Amazing Grace,” “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” and “The Bird Song” by The Wailin’ Jennys of Winnipeg.
You can learn to see these patterns on the staff, too. Instead of reading and decoding each note, you’ll look at a group of several notes and recognizing the musical idea that they represent. You will then play the notes individually, but you’re not thinking of them individually.
If this sounds very different from the way you learned music, good. The way most people learn music is a huge failure that fails to produce musicians, have you noticed? Many teachers are skeptical of my way and tend to prefer to teach the entire system up front. Good luck to ‘em. My way works.
This contextual approach to learning musical ideas, language, and many other things is not to be confused with methodologies like “whole language” reading instruction that expect a student to intuit rules and practices through repeated exposure. No, we don’t learn through osmosis. We need someone or something to help us break things down systematically. What I’m saying is that we have to break things down to the relevant units, and those aren’t always what they seem to be.
As a business coach and consultant, a significant aspect of my work is to help my clients identify the value that they are bringing to their own clients and customers. The reason this is so hard is that many of us have been trained from our very first job to believe that our economic value is measured in hourly units. We unwittingly build our world around these hourly units, whether charging by the hour or measuring our output by the number of hours worked, without identifying what we’re qualitatively contributing that makes the difference. Then, we’re stuck in a cycle of being paid by the hour or, if we manage to escape that, working hour after hour behind the scenes to justify ourselves. It’s hard work to focus on the value first and then build our schedule and activities around that, but time is the wrong unit of measure.
School is set up the same way: focused on hours spent. So is prison. And to get into a “good college,” the conventional wisdom is that a student must focus on grades, inane clubs, and standardized test scores. What do these test scores measure, anyway?
Young adults learn that their scanty resumés are scrutinized closely for signs of immaturity, so they are exhorted to stay in miserable jobs instead of getting out early. As they get older, they chase money as a proxy for happiness. They get a lot of help spending it. “Buy as much house as you can afford,” goes the conventional wisdom. We’re looking at the wrong units everywhere.
It’s reasonable that we might believe that just trying harder is the solution — that’s the way many of us have been taught to measure how well something is going. But it is better to measure the success of an endeavor based on its results.
If you are putting the time into something and still not seeing great results, it might be time to take a different approach. How are you measuring your progress? Who might be able to help you find a fresh perspective? When we focus on the right units, we should see not only encouraging progress, but greater ease along the way.
