What makes a good Teacher?

I'm lucky that in over 20 years of playing the drums in London I've been able to study under a multitude of teachers.

I'm currently with a fairly well known guy who is out around the world on tour with someone for most of his time, but teaches when he has some downtime. He teaches just because he loves to do so and is absolutely brilliant.

It suits me as well that I go to him say once every six months and walk away with a mountain of things to work on, that might take me another six months, a kind of point and shoot approach. He gives me guidance, points out things that might just need a little fine tuning, then gives me wads of manuscript paper about what we've done and sends me off into the big bad world.

He can cover things in a reactive way; when I say I want to address a particular issue and he helps me to solve it. Or he can be proactive; when he looks at my playing and improves things that I'm unaware I had a problem with.

I've had teachers who have been good at one or the other before; the proactive or the reactive, but there have been few with this mix of both approaches.

But I saw something the other day; someone who is a "professional" in a field who has no practical expeience in said field and it got me thinking about what makes a good teacher.

I made a list of my drum teachers recently and it consisted of a motley crew of the good, the bad and the ugly. There were two who, as teachers, were downright useless to me. I say 'to me' because it may well have been the case that these people were fantastic mentors to different students, that they just didn't click for me. But also I think a truly good teacher should be able to adapt to the differing learning styles of students.

One of these useless to me guys was / is a top drawer internationally rated player. He has gigged, and still does, with world class artists and is hugely liked and regarded in the music business. And in the one (maybe my sample size was small here) lesson I had with him I got the distinct feeling that he had decided that he would do a bit of teaching in between gigs just to keep some money coming in with next to no thought put in to how he woould approach things.

Lovely bloke. Crap teacher.

The other baddie was a well know London player / teacher who I studied with for about six months. He was only my second ever tutor and I think I was a bit green. I did learn some useful titbits from him but there came a point where I looked at the picture and realised that I felt worse about my playing and abilities coming out of every lesson than when I went in.

Maybe some students get motivated by feeling like this, but I don't. So I moved on.

When I look at the most impactful teachers I've had I notice that they are the ones who have given me confidence, who have positively inspired me. There have been a couple who have been okay, but seemed rather bitter about their own lack of success, about the fact that they were sitting teaching idiots like me rather than out gigging with the Foo Fighters. We all want to feel wanted, not a poor second best or a fallback because Plan A turned out to be filled by Taylor Hawkins or Craig Blundell.

Maybe I'm also a bit shallow, but I've picked teachers to begin with based mostly on what I think of their playing but also on their reputation; who they've played with and what they've done.

Then, very quickly, it becomes all about how good a teacher they are to me.

With practical expeience comes knowledge, but one needs to know how to get that knowledge into your student in the best and most positive way.

Two things are definite; just being a top level player is not enough and just knowing the theory isn't enough. The best ones are those with a mix of gigging / playing experience with teaching ability. It needs to be the right balance, but I suppose one can't really have too much teaching nous.

Just for the record; I can't teach to save my life!