Inside the Bookstore:
The Art of the Interview
USIC TEACHING IS ONLY AS GOOD AS the people you get to work with each week. Like a trans-continental car trip, it's the choice of travel companions that makes the difference between an adventure and an ordeal.
That's what a studio interview should be for. A quest for great travel companions. Choose badly and you might find yourself stuck with a deadwood student.
The problem is that the traditional interview model is designed primarily to identify students with ability. That's great for filling your studio with students who have excellent relative pitch, and can clap eighth notes. But I don't need my studio traveling companions to have impeccable rhythm, or have a cupboard full of competition trophies. I need to know that the time I spend with them will be quality time, because I'm choosing someone that I'll be spending 20+ hours with every year—the car trip equivalent of driving from Sydney to Perth.
That doesn't stop me from helping them develop impeccable rhythm or win competition trophies. It just means that I'll have a lot more fun along the way.
So if your interview is not about running aptitude tests, what is it about? How can you turn that initial meeting into a powerful detector of Students You'll Love To Work With?
One of the best ways to stop your job from becoming the same-old-grind is to have students who are able to genuinely surprise you—students who say the unexpected thing, who unveil the interpretation you never considered, and who have the knack of ensuring that this week's lesson is entirely unlike last week's.
For that reason, some of the questions I ask in interviews have nothing to do with music at all. Instead I ask them to tell me three things they definitely don't want for their birthday. Or four things they wouldn't expect to find in their fridge at home.
To that second question, some students will say "shoes" or "pencils"—household objects that belong somewhere other than the fridge. Nothing wrong with that. But the really creative students will blow the door off reality completely. I've heard at times:
* A 747 jet airliner
* Darth Vader
* A circus troupe of pygmy trapeze artists
Now you ask yourself. Who's going to be more fun on the great car trip that is music lessons? The kid whose mind turned the fridge into a Big Top, or the other one who says "honey, because we keep honey in the cupboard, not the fridge, well, usually anyway, I think"
Doesn't really matter what the question is, as long as it's open ended, and something they are unlikely to have considered in advance. Float the scenario—you'll learn a lot about the person in front of you from how they respond.
Since so much of lessons is about giving directions, students who are won't go where you point can be particularly frustrating.
My favourite way to test for this is to chain together a length series of verbal-only instructions, and see how they fare. No demonstrations. No diagrams. Just words from me.
It doesn't have to be about music. I might give them a piece of paper and a set of colored pencils, and then tell them that they're going to do a drawing for me...in a minute. First of all, I'm going to tell them what to draw, and they're not allowed to start until I've finished my request.
At that point, I might ask for:
* A big yellow border around the page, with red spots in each corner
* Four circles in the top part of the page, each circle to be a different color from the other
* The student's name written in all capital letters under the circles. All vowels to be written in orange.
* In the space underneath their name, color it with red and yellow stripes.
I might run through the list a second time just quickly, but often I don't.
Now I'm not looking for the student who gets everything right—(I'm not sure that I would get everything right were the instructions given to me!) What I am looking for is how they interact with me as they try to piece anything missing together. Do they repeat things back to me? Ask questions? Start before I've finished explaining, despite the fact I asked them not to? Insist on me running through the list at least one more time? Sit there silently and do the best they can, even when it's obvious that they're lost?
Again, I'm not looking for a particular outcome. But I will learn a lot about my possible travel companion by watching how they handle all this.
By which time, it's on to the next test.
The nature of the interview process means that you'll rarely be seeing the prospective student at their comfortable best—they've never met you before, and have probably just had a "Timmy, be on your best behavior" earful from their parents in the car.
Obviously you want to be screening students carefully, but sitting them down and asking them questions as though they're an unemployed jail escapee suitor for your only daughter is not the way forward.
Unfortunately though, that's often how interviews run—we ask questions, they answer, without a trace of a smile and their hands on their knees, as though posing for a Victorian photograph, and looking periodically to their parents with "help me" on their eyes. One tactic is to sidestep the "interview" style entirely, and turn the whole process into a lesson instead, but with one important twist:You're going to be the student. They're going to teach you.
Make a big deal out of swapping chairs with them—they get to sit in the teaching chair, you're going to sit or stand wherever the student normally would. Their job then is to talk you through something. How to hold your instrument. How to tap the rhythm measures 24-28 of the piece that's on the music stand. How to work out a good starting tempo for this adagio waltz.
As part of the process, you'll be able to ask questions, not as an interrogator, instead in the guise of someone seeking clarification, or needing additional help. So instead of the interview style "Tell me what 4/4 time means", you can point at the score and ask:
"These numbers here...I'm not so sure...I think they're for my counting, but why do I need two of them?"
As the teacher, they'll explain it as best they can, and you'll end up with a great insight into their understanding of the issue. But more importantly, you'll learn a lot about how easy they will be to work with. Were they patient with your questions? Were they able to explain it in another way when you looked confused, or are they limited to simply repeating the same phrases? Were they quick to volunteer information you didn't ask for, or do you have to lead the witness throughout?
At the end of 5 minutes of being their student, you'll learn more than you would have in 30 minutes of interview style questions.
Another technique is to give them the score and play the piece for them...but not very well. Vary your tempos. Make your tone overly harsh, or your intonation suspect. Misread rhythms or ignore dynamics. Then, having played them this mess, ask them to give you advice to make it better—you'd fix whatever they talk about, but keep any broken elements that they don't mention.
The whole exercise provides a powerful insight into which musical elements are on their musical self-help radar. Did they notice that you were gradually speeding up? Can they tell when you're creeping towards a quarter tone flat? Or that your breaths between phrases are overly noisy?
Obviously you're letting them know that you're role-playing here—you don't want them thinking that their new teacher actually performs like that. But once it's clear that there's a game afoot here, seeing you mess up like that is enormously disarming, helping warm up even the most uneasy of students.
Don't stop there! Show me more interview tactics