Milt’s Mindful Moment #10

Sharpen the Chain

I’ve cut a lot of firewood in my life. Enough to know that a chainsaw doesn’t care how motivated you are, how strong you feel, or how badly the job needs to get done. It only cares about one thing: whether the chain is sharp. When it is, the saw settles into the log and moves forward almost on its own. The cut is clean. The work feels honest. When it isn’t, everything gets harder. The saw bogs down. The cut goes crooked. You lean in with your shoulders and your back, forcing progress that should never require that much effort. It’s physically and mentally taxing. Music education works the same way.

The chain in teaching isn’t passion or dedication. It isn’t experience or credentials. It’s our musical approach, the way we think about learning, how we sequence ideas and instruction, and the clarity with which we invite students into the musical process. A sharp approach cuts clean. A dull one still gets the job done, but only by force.

The danger of a dull chain is that it can make effort feel, well, noble. Longer rehearsals, louder instructions, more repetition. These look like greater commitment on our part. We feel like we’re giving everything we have. But effort alone isn’t proof of effectiveness. Sometimes it’s just a sign that the tool hasn’t been sharpened in a while.

Anyone who’s run a chainsaw knows the temptation to keep going. I’ll sharpen it after this log. Stopping feels inefficient. Sharpening feels unproductive. Yet a few minutes spent sharpening saves hours of unnecessary labor. The same is true in teaching. Sharpening looks like pausing to rethink musical choices, perhaps a different pedagogical approach, different repertoire, choosing better questions instead of more volume, and perhaps most important, offering musical clarity instead of pressure.

When the chain stays dull long enough, we start blaming the wood. The log is too hard. The tree is too big. In our rehearsal rooms, that blame shifts easily to students. They’re unmotivated, unfocused, unwilling. But wood is wood. Students are students. Musicians are musicians. Before labeling them as the problem, it’s worth examining the approach we’re using. Many times, we might just find that our frustration, burn-out or negative attitude is actually a result of what and how we’re connecting musically with our students.

Empowerment doesn’t require brute force. It creates conditions where energy flows instead of being drained. A sharp chain doesn’t exhaust the operator; it sustains the operator. Need an example? Think of that rehearsal when everything just seemed to click, to work, to musically move forward, like a sharp chain through hard wood. Music education doesn’t need stronger arms. It needs sharper chains. There’s no honor in bleeding knuckles if the work never required them. The real work begins when we’re willing to stop long enough to sharpen.