The piano teacher’s dilemma

A Malaysian friend, whom I got to know from a yoga class, asked me out for dinner last week. She is a piano teacher by profession, and has been teaching privately in Singapore for the last five years. Both of us got along quite well together, and shared a few common interests like yoga, organic diet and music. I noticed that she was carrying a huge case when we met. Sensing my curiosity, she told me it was a viola inside and she had just attended a lesson.

Over our organic vegetarian dinner, she revealed that she had actually stopped learning the viola for many years, and only decided to “pull it out of the closet” last week. Her reason for picking up viola again is quite interesting – she wants to find out if she should continue to “do music as a career”. She shared that she had volunteered to another friend to perform with their orchestra for an upcoming concert in August, and immediately looked up a viola tutor to fine-tune her rusty skills. Her idea seems that if she is able to stay committed to the weekly practices with the orchestra, then she would know her “direction is still in the music arena”. She is also seriously considering if she should continue to teach piano, or if she should go into a different field, like counseling or nursing, which are areas she is always keen on.

My friend’s dilemma brings to mind the principles of self-attribution, especially Bem’s self-perception theory. Social psychologists have pointed out that sometimes our own emotions, attitudes, or abilities are unclear and ambiguous to us. Rather than figuring out what we like or want by introspection, Bem argued that we receive only minimal internal cues to our attitudes. If this is the case, we must infer our own attitudes by observing our own overt behaviour. This seems to be precisely what my friend is doing. She wishes to know whether she still has a passion for music, by seeing how well she plays the viola, and how much perseverance and focus she has during her practice sessions with the orchestra.

I could also sense this principle at work in diminishing the intrinsic interest she used to have for teaching piano. She is paid quite substantially for her job, but this does not seem to give her much satisfaction lately. She complained about students who either learn too slowly, or who do not have much passion, but learn the instrument in order to attain the various grades at the behest of their parents. She said she sometimes wonders how much benefit to society she contributes as a piano teacher.

I think she could be falling victim to over-justification, which occurs when people attribute their liking for a task to the (material) rewards they obtain, rather than to their own intrinsic interest in the job. Her motivation as a piano teacher appears to have been undermined by the material gains she has made, and also by her perceived lack of aptitude in her students. I wonder if she would still feel motivated to continue her career teaching piano if her students show a great deal of interest and improvements in their skills.

I hope my friend won’t need to take too long to find the answer she is looking for.