In high school, I played the guitar.

I had three major influences, the first of whom was my guitar teacher, James Brown. Yes, that was his name.

He had the patience of a saint… literally. I was always late to lessons, yet he always seemed to have extra time for me.

James’ approach to teaching was different from what I was used to in my regular classes. He’d ask me what songs I was interested in learning, while also giving me constant exposure to some of the classics. If I didn’t enjoy the song, then we didn’t learn to play it – he always had something else he could throw my way.

The second influence was Jack Johnson – yes, the Jack Johnson, but no, I have never met him. Why was he a major influence on me? I read somewhere (or maybe James told me) that he only started playing the guitar at the age of 14.

Now, you mightn’t think Jack Johnson is the greatest guitarist of all time or that his songs don’t involve insanely extravagant solos, and you’d be right. But this was exactly the reason he was an influence for me. His talents weren’t extending what sounds were possible through an instrument; he represented a realistic expert who I could learn from. I also really enjoyed his music and loved learning how to play his songs even more so.

My third influence was one I didn’t realise at the time, unfortunately.

Steven Reece. Who knows what situation put him in a teaching position, but this guy wasn’t destined to work 8 to 4 in a high school, trying to teach pimple-faced adolescents music. Mr Reece was meant for the road. It was like he slept in and missed the tour bus, left behind to live a normal life while his soul chased the band into the ether.

My earliest core memory of Mr Reece was the first solo I had to perform in front of my class. I chose to play Day Tripper by the Beatles. If you haven’t heard it before (or not for a long time), the song opens with a guitar riff. It repeats a couple of times, just the guitar and nothing else, until a tambourine for a bar or so, followed by a simple drum kit beat.

I played my solo with a classmate on the drums (we skipped the tambourine). I hit each note in perfect time and, as the drums came in and I moved through the rest of the song, I remember thinking, “yeah, I got this!”.

Mr Reece stopped us halfway through, kicking the student off the drums, visibly frustrated. “Let’s do it again, but this time, play it.“

I had no idea what he meant, but nevertheless, I started again from the top.

Before the drums even came in, Mr Reece cut me short again. “No, no, no. Don’t just play the notes, play the notes!” (with an emphasis on the second “play”, which might’ve been useful if I’d known the difference, but I wasn’t privy to what that could’ve meant).

So I started again and again and again, Mr Reece stopping me each time in front of the other 13-year-olds in the room, all of whom were glad it wasn’t them being asked to play the same song over and over, each time with one fewer note. Mr Reece looked like he wanted to throw a drumstick at my head.

It was as though not only the notes I was playing were wrong, but the way I was playing them was wrong too.

Finally, Mr Reece came over and took the guitar from my hands to play it himself.

His hands had a persistent shake. If he were holding his coffee, the cup would’ve looked like the glass of water scene from Jurassic Park. From memory, his preferred instrument was the trumpet, but as many music teachers do, he played everything. He didn’t look anywhere near as adept with the instrument as my guitar teacher, James, and I’m not even sure if he had even ever played this song before. Nevertheless, he skimmed my sheet music and began.

Mr Reece turned up the amp and started to play. He made so many mistakes I hadn’t made, but he kept going and eventually got the riff right after four or five attempts. What he did, but never explained, was hit each note, let it ring out, and then hit the next note a little bit earlier than you might expect if you were following a metronome or the sheet music exactly. There was also a little grittiness in the way that he played. He sometimes hit the neighbouring string. Not that it was intentional, nor did it make it sound better, but it didn’t sound any worse either. It all sounded better because when he played it, he played it. He was at one with the snare and hi-hat, and even though nobody was playing it, you could swear that one of the Beatles was in the room rattling the tambourine.

Mr Reece understood music. It flowed through his veins with the same purpose as blood. Music breathed life into him, and he reciprocated.

In all honesty though, he wasn’t the greatest teacher. My guitar teacher, James Brown, was the greatest teacher. But there is something I see now in Mr Reece that I didn’t see in many of my teachers, certainly none to the extent I see it in him – a profound relationship with the discipline. He understood and appreciated the fundamental power and beauty of sound and what it meant to play music.

I have a lot of respect for Mr Reece and I really do wish that as a teacher he had been better able to connect with his students. Maybe he is now. But I also wish more of my other teachers had been like him.

In school, we are generally taught by teachers who have expertise in a discipline or may even be experts in their fields. This is great and is a prerequisite for helping students develop technical, procedural, and conceptual understanding. But every subject carries a unique lens through which to view the world, a truth the classroom rarely places at the forefront. An essence that we never seem to have enough time to honour.

Subjects in the creative arts naturally lend themselves to honouring this essence more than the stereotypical “textbook-y” subjects like science and mathematics. In reality, all subjects in a school context undergo a hollowing out to extract the key skills and concepts we want students to learn in the limited time they are allocated each week. It then falls on the teacher to craft opportunities for students to learn too much in not enough time, while masterfully developing their awareness of the deeper essence of what they’re learning in a meaningful way.

It’s completely ok to say, “There isn’t enough time to do all of that,” because that’s true. It’s unrealistic and unhelpful to pretend otherwise.

It’s also completely ok to say, “That’s why it’s even more important that students understand the essence of the subject,” because something will always be pushed out. The real travesty is when students do learn, but don’t know what it means to do it (and I say “do it” in the same way that Mr Reece kept telling me that I had to “play it”).

In an attempt to be less abstract and simply try to make more sense, I’m going to cut the chase and use mathematics as the example of another subject other than music.

For me, a perpetual question at the forefront of my mind is: How will students remember mathematics? Not from the perspective of “How will they manage to hold all this information in their memory?” but from an experiential lens, where the broader strokes of understanding paint a larger backdrop for meaning.

But remaining purely abstract is like watching a student solve a problem and telling them they need to do it with more curiosity or wonder, or to develop more profound conjectures. It’s equally as fraught to go the other way and lay it out like a masterclass on how one might solve a problem with just the right amount of specialising and generalising.

What can be challenging is the sheer variability of it all. Just like Mr Reece playing my solo, students have to find their way through, using what they know to make sense of what they don’t. They need to be comfortable with mistakes and more motivated by questioning than answering.

The mathematical equivalent to what Mr Reece meant when he said “play it”, can also be perceived in the same way. In fact, it can be quite helpful to do think of it literally. When students play with a mathematical problem, they explore its constraints, interact with its structure, and push at its edges to see what happens.

Incorrect answers in mathematics are inherently more interesting than correct ones because they force you to go back and approach it with a not only fresh eyes, but a completely new set of senses you didn’t employ the first time you mindlessly went through the predefined steps in your head (or your book). Mistakes force you to spend more time with the problem, which is a good thing.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman references Jennifer Roberts (an art history lecturer) who assigned her students to spend three hours in an art gallery in front of a single piece of art. The students reported that, beyond the challenge of the task itself, they began to notice a depth of detail in the art that feels seemingly impossible to notice in a shorter time.

What students discover when they explore a math problem, rather than just solving it and moving onto the next problem is important both for doing justice to the beauty of the underlying mathematics of the problem and for honouring the essence of thinking mathematically.

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about Mr Reece lately. Maybe it’s because my own pedagogy aligned with my guitar teacher, James: patient, relationship-focused, student-centred. I had students play songs they liked. And now I’m questioning whether my students were just playing the instrument or if they were playing it. They were, by and large, successful and learned the content to achieve good results, but what were they really achieving?

Maybe I’m just getting older and more jaded, bitter that I missed Jack Johnson’s tour bus.

I don’t have answers here, but I think we can learn a lot from our muso teachers like Mr Reece.