Agnes

“Pegagogy” has been a buzzword in recent conversations with my mom. As a music educator, I am no stranger to different temperaments amongst students.

My mom being an educator also has considerably much to say. In recent years, she has been training in movement fitness with her yoga teacher and attends his classes along with other middle-aged ladies. Her teacher is a devoted student of the Ido Portal method. Their method thrives on variety, based on the belief that humans should be able to learn and perform different activities. If we directed our focus to only one technique, be it playing the violin or swimming, over time, our brains would surely lack the neuroplasticity to function in different settings or activities. As such, my mom’s training rotated between locomotion, juggling, calisthenics (think gymnastic rings), combat training (boxing, sparring, etc.), football, and even shuttlecock kicking. Asides from variety, the Ido Portal teaching method also requires strict adherence to the program and does not allow questions.

While her teacher had progressed under Ido Portal’s method, most of his students’ progress stalled and he struggled to understand why that was the case. They showed up week after week, (tried to) follow his instructions in class, but yet they had nothing to show for themselves. My mom, being an educator herself before she retired, had much to say about this.

First, it was quite obvious that Ido’s students training directly under him are all professional athletes in their own respective fields, be it yogis, acrobats or dancers in their prime. Which is wildly in contrast to my mom and her group, amateur yogis and ladies with little to no exercising experience ranging from 40+ to 60+ years old. My mom said it is wild to expect them to wear actual boxing gloves when most of the class are not even familiar with the basic footwork yet. She predicted it would only be a couple weeks until her teacher would switch activities again, and found it odd that her teacher seemed to be in a rush to go through the activities, never mind that 90% of the class not learning a thing. This similar pattern repeated time after time over the years.

Being a young-ish music educator, it came to me very early on that beginners in any discipline require repetition to retain information. If they have not harnessed the basic building blocks of their craft, how do we expect them to perform variations. If classical pianists do not understand time signatures and practice the scales, it would be impossible for them to transition into jazz. When we are trying to learn something entirely foreign to us, it takes repetitions to create new neural pathways in our brain.

My mom’s teacher should have take into the observation that his group of students needed more time than professional athletes to learn the techniques of different activities. Rather than going down the downward spiral of thinking what his should, would, and could have done, he ought to appreciate the difference between recreational fitness goers and professional trainers like him.

There is not one pedagogical method that is inherently better than others, only educators that can adapt their pedagogy accordingly as opposed to ones that fail to do so. My mom’s experience is a cautionary tale for me to not fall into the trap of basing my educator identity around one pedagogy, and be humble enough to appreciate new observations that come along the way.