October 3, 2006 - Tuesday
Last Friday afternoon I started working with Harry on some new rock-n-roll drumming patterns and it got a little tenuous. It's been a while nice Harry got this frustrated, eyes welling up a little, although I have to say that these new patterns are tough. They're great because they are the foundations of most of the music he hears on the radio and once he can play them he'll have taken a great leap in his drumming ability. Yet at the same time, they require a significant bit of co-ordination, with all his limbs doing something different at the same time. Make no mistake, while I probably could have figured out how to play "Mission to Mars" with a little bit of practicing just based on my musical experience, these new patterns are beyond me. As basic as they may be for drummers, they require skills that I don't have but that Harry has been learning.

Anyway, Harry stuck with it Friday, and muddled through again on Monday when we practiced again. We got as far as him being able to just about play the snare and bass drum rhythms together while essentially ignoring the hi-hat. Then, yesterday he sat down and basically played everything flawlessly, with the hi-hat. It was great and. I was floored, raised my hands in the air and shouted and all that. Harry was proud.

But I've been a musician for a long time and there was something about this that didn't quite add up. You rarely get to sit down and play something that well a day after you've struggled. Learning is usually a slow process, unless...

So this morning while he was brushing his teeth I said to him, "Harry, I'm really impressed how well you played your new beats last night. I thought you might be able to do them without the hi-hat, but you did them perfectly. Have you been thinking about them?"
"Yeah," he said with a little coy smile, then added, "I've been doing like this on the bus," pretending to bang on the bus seats (he's the first one on the bus in the morning so the seats are all empty).

I think that is really terrific. I don't know whether he was doing it because he loves the drums and wanted to learn to play faster or because he was frustrated that he couldn't do it and forced himself to learn, but it hardly matters. He found a way to do it on his own. That's great. Whether playing the drums is the end of the means or the means to the end, it doesn't matter. The effort is worth it if it teaches him that "he can."


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