Teaching Generation Z to Play Music

The image accompanying today's post is a cover for a Samsung smart phone. It shows the evolution of man from knuckle-dragger to the pinnacle of evolution: in this case, a sax player.

Sweet! And, on a cell phone cover.

And why not? Most of my students fall into Gen Z, the pre-teen and teen years, and they spend a lot of their time connected to the Internet on their smart phones.

A recent study posted by NPR in fact claims that Gen Z kids spend more time on the Internet than they do sleeping. Gen Z kids are the most inter-connected generation we have ever known. They can (and do) multitask on several screens, and they crave social contact as well.

They move about the planet in groups; hence the rise in popularity of pop music festivals.

Most of the Gen Z-ers in my lessons came to  music as an elective, not as an outgrowth from their home life. Few of them had the kind of childhood I did -- where my parents played records almost non-stop, especially at dinner.  Listening to music was a group thing in my house, and I am grateful. That's where my own deep and abiding love of music comes from.

And wanting to make those sounds is what inspired me to want to take music farther than the fifth grade band class where it all started for me.

Now, as a music educator, I am keenly aware of how environment nurtures creativity. Likewise, I know that everything I ask my Gen Z students to do -- namely, spend much time alone in a room, running music exercises over and over and over again -- runs completely counter to their generational needs.

How do I compete with a generation that has so much of the Internet at their fingertips on demand that they are able to become curators of their own lives?

I don't know. Learning to play an instrument in our current model is all about woodshedding. It takes time and patience alone to learn, say, all of the blues scales.

The one thing the Internet can't do is learn them for you. You can find dozens of tutorials posted by master sax players on YouTube, but by the end of a day, you have to knuckle down and learn them by playing them over and over.

I'll leave you with this question: how do I keep lessons interesting and relevant and still get my teen students to cover the bases and actually practice during their spare time?

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