Tanner Pruett - Coyle - Ch. 10 and Epilogue

 Chapter 10

This chapter is titled, "Tom Martinez and the $60 Million Bet," where Coyle discusses an important football drafting story about the Raiders in 2007. The most important part of the story is how the people in charge of the Raiders went to a man named Tom Martinez to help decide who to pick with their first pick in the draft. In Coyle's interactions with Martinez, Coyle observed how his coaching was individualized for each quarterback he was working with. One of my favorite parts of the chapter was this quote from Martinez, "I want to teach you how to learn in a way that's right for you. My greatest challenge is not teaching Tom Brady, but some guy who can't do it all, and getting them to a point where they can. Now that is coaching." We can apply this to our teaching as voice teachers by always being flexible in the way we teach. Our teaching should never be static, but dynamic in order to meet the diverse and unique needs of each of our students. Even when we go from students to teachers, our learning is never done.

Epilogue

Daniel Coyle titles the epilogue of his book, "Epilogue: The Myelin World," where he discusses how myelin and his theory for how talent is developed is present in many parts of the world. The first "world" he discusses is education, where he emphasizes the importance of master teachers, as evidenced by the education systems in Finland. Then he discusses the business world, where companies like Toyota have skyrocketed to the top of their industry by focusing on correcting errors and by making small adjustments on the assembly floor. The next world he talks about is psychology, where programs like the "Shyness Clinic" are using chunking and smaller socializing exercises to help shy people work up to participating in normal and natural everyday conversation. In his closing remarks, Coyle mentions how the mindset of myelin completely changes how we view and interact with the world. Things like failure are no longer devastating, but an exciting opportunity to develop and strengthen myelin. I think the main thing we could take away from this chapter as voice teachers is the importance of celebrating failure. Especially as vocalists, it is easy to let one bad part of a performance completely ruin and tarnish the experience. As a "tenor," a single voice crack in a performance can completely shut down my instrument and ruin the rest of the performance. However, if we teach our students to rejoice and encourage failure, we will open the path for them to reach their vocal goals. Failure does not stop us from finding success, instead, it is a necessary step in the road to reaching it.