Only What I Know: I know learning guitar is a process.

Process and Challenges

My classes have not started yet, though I have signed up for a yahoo group for guitar enthusiasts in Seattle. I wouldn’t meet until I get much better, however. I don’t want to be bad at guitar in person. To get up on the basics I am mostly using the book. The book indicates that the player’s fingers go around the neck of the guitar for many to most of the chords. I look at finger placement in the book and try to do what I see. Sometimes my fingers are just not long enough for the proper placement. Other times it takes a little more finger dexterity than I’ve got at the moment.

I looked to Google images for other ways of visualizing finger placement, to get at the ideas from another angle. I also went to YouTube for instruction on pick selection, timing/rhythm of strumming, and how to tune the guitar. I don’t have a physical tuner and my guitar is out of tune. I downloaded and tried out Yousician but my guitar is simply too out of tune right now for the app to pass me on to its skill building section. I’ll have to get a tuner or try out the online tuners. That’s the next big step, I’d say.

Goals and Accomplishments

So after one week I’m not surf guitar legend Dick Dale yet. I can strum. I like the sound it makes. I can’t yet play Dick Dale’s Misirlou, the theme song to Pulp Fiction, but I’ve got a basic understanding now of hand position, finger placement, strumming, timing, half and quarter notes and, more importantly, how to get more information/help when I get stuck, which I can tell is going to happen an awful lot between where I am now and Dick Dale. Since I can’t do Misirlou just yet, I went to Amazon for some songs I could conceivably play in the foreseeable future.

Guitar and Participatory Learning

As a teacher who wants to know how to teach students how to learn anything in the information age, this experiment in learning guitar has got me in a reflective mood, and feeling hopeful, too. I see now that every problem is just a good search away from its solution. (And a little patience for the trial and error process to unfold.) The key to a good search, it seems, is knowing the search engine, how it works, what search terms it uses, etc., and how to ask a good question, one that is directly relevant to the problem I’m looking to solve. Once I know the engine and how to turn my question into a query that the engine recognizes, it is just a matter of selecting which of the proposed solutions to try out first!

Only What I Know: I don’t know guitar … yet.

Starting at the age of four, I took piano lessons every week. To prepare for the lesson I would read and write in a theory book; I would practice playing all the assigned songs. When I later learned to also play by ear, I created my own chords and songs. Because I wanted feedback on my musical creations, but didn’t have an audience, I pretended that people were listening to me play.

In junior high, I got the audience I wanted through band class and school recitals. There was no piano in band, however, so I had to pick a different instrument. I chose the flute. Because I knew piano, I also knew how to read music, unlike many others in band. I did not stick with the flute, and eventually quit band, but the success I had playing two instruments led me to believe I could learn to play any instrument.

About eight years ago, my father in law got me a guitar for Christmas. Unfortunately, I had little time to learn to play it. I had three babies to care for. I taught school. I had a marriage and house to attend to. Although I continued to play piano from time to time, and love music in general, learning to play a new instrument was not a priority for me. Now, years later, things are different. The kids are bigger, I am a more efficient teacher, house and family are in order, and, importantly, I’m in a class that calls for learning new things in new ways. Now is a good time to learn guitar.

I’ve gathered resources, set some goals, and I have anticipated challenges. I pulled the old guitar out from the closet, bought some picks, got a book, and found some videos on the Internet. I aim to learn to play a beginner’s song by six weeks. Although I have a music background, achievement of this goal is far from automatic. Guitar is not the same as piano. I will need to learn to use my fingers in a different way. I will need to know finger positions for all notes and chords. I will need to know the special rhythm and beat of playing a stringed instrument.

Although I appreciate the wealth and diversity of video and textual training materials available today (like this, this, and this), I am not only or even principally a visual learner. I am also an auditory and kinesthetic learner, one who benefits from in-person question-and-answer as the means of direct oversight of my trial-and-error learning process. Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone in my immediate area that plays guitar and is willing to mentor me in this way, so I purchased four training sessions to supplement the resources identified above.

I will know I am making progress toward my above stated goal when I rightly apply the textual/visual materials and yet come up with a list of questions/problems for resolution with the trainer. I will know I am making progress when that list changes over time, when old problems are solved and new ones emerge, that is. Early problems to overcome will likely include: identifying all the parts of the guitar by name and feel, consistently holding the guitar the right yet comfortable way, being able to tune the guitar on my own or with a tuner, playing major chords with ease, strumming a pleasing sound, and overcome finger pain.

This is just what I expect to happen. I don’t really know what sort of challenges I’ll actually get stuck on at the beginning stages. Here’s what I do know: learning to play a beginner song on guitar with limited personal training won’t be easy for me, but I’m determined to make it happen one way or another.

Only What I Know

The Guardian recently reported that 88 year old author Harper Lee will publish this July a sequel to her classic work To Kill A Mockingbird. The new book will be called Go Set A Watchman. I took interest in this story about the long-overdue sequel because To Kill A Mockingbird long ago inspired my love of reading and it more than any other experience first got me thinking what it might be like to live as someone else, "to climb into someone's skin and walk around in it" as the book's Atticus Finch puts it.

I didn’t come to To Kill A Mockingbird in the usual way. My older sister had the book for her high school English class. When she was done with it, I found it on her dresser and read it. I didn’t read it because it was assigned to me or because it was a classic. I was eleven. I liked birds and the cover of the book had a bird on it, a mockingbird to be precise. It was that simple. But I was surprised to find that the book had little to do with birds.

Instead of birds I found a story about big problems told from the vantage point of a little girl. That girl, Scout, was the daughter of Atticus Finch, a small town lawyer and legislator who lived in the deep South during the height of Jim Crow. Like Scout, I was the youngest child in my house. Like Scout, I felt I was overly critiqued, always challenged. Unlike me, Scout at least was always heard.

Scout asked a lot of questions about the way the people in that world related to one another. I pondered the same kinds of questions, but never out loud. Atticus patiently answered Scout’s questions, explained what it meant to live in a world that presented hard choices. I did not have anyone like that in my life, so I leaned on Atticus and Scout. My conscience deepened because of To Kill A Mockingbird, because of the conversations between Atticus and Scout.

Today, I still read books that allow me to explore ideas of moral significance from vantage points foreign to my own. I teach this sort of book too to emphasize the importance of question and answer. Harper Lee not only influenced how I think, but how I teach reading, writing, listening, speaking and, most importantly, critical thinking. She once said a writer should write only what she knows, and should write truthfully. Well, that's what I plan to do here, with this blog. That's why I call it Only What I Know.