A long term...

I officially have 1 week left of Fall term before a well-deserved long Winter break. Today was my last day of group teaching, and I guess it's appropriate to reflect a little bit here.

The most difficult thing about teaching in general is knowing how far you can push/how hard you can work a student before they hit the breaking point. I feel like my first month of teaching was lots of little tests to see how I could work with each student individually, or each school class as a group. As I see it, private students divide into 4 categories:

1. Students who can accept direct criticism - These are the kids who you can say "Go back and fix the rhythm" or whatever without sugar-coating it at all and they don't get discouraged. These are usually the more advanced students or the more self-aware students who understand the good things and the not so good things about their individual playing. Teaching these students is really nice because you can have a thoughtful, mature conversation about technical and musical matters with them. The only caveat is that you need to emphasize what they do well just as much as what they need to improve. It is VERY easy to focus on what to fix (this is our job as teachers, anyway), but we must focus on cultivating in them an appropriate level of confidence so they don't feel self-conscious about their level of playing, especially when they are in performance. You have to be careful that you don't make them afraid to make mistakes. Which brings me to my next group of students.

2. Students who are afraid to make mistakes. I have a few students who are really really afraid to make a mistake (read: miss a note). The problem with these students is they don't realize that making consistent rhythm/tempo mistakes are much much much worse than playing a wrong note or two. The difficulty in teaching these students is that you have to demonstrate to them why it is worse to play rhythmically badly than to play a few wrong or out of tune notes, and then you have to back off on the direct criticisms of their intonation on a run-through. For these students, it is more important to get them playing at tempo than to have things polished pitch-wise at the outset. A good practice strategy for them is to really separate intonation work from playing the piece with rhythm. I usually don't do this, as I really think that it is important to practice playing the piece with bowings/rhythms/tuning as an organic unit, but these students have a tough time doing that.

3. Students who are on the cusp of quitting/dropping lessons. I have a few students who I know are really close to stopping their lessons. What I try to do here is to not worry so much about them taking an exam, but getting them into playing some more fun music - fiddle tunes, showtunes, popular music, Disney music, anything that they enjoy playing. Also, getting them to play in an orchestra is very helpful - they start to associate playing music with socializing and having fun.

4. Total beginners. These are some of my favorite students to teach. They are excited to learn every new skill and usually come to the lesson ready to listen and learn every week. You can get them into an immediate schedule at the lesson - violin out to tune right away, rosin the bow while I tune, get the music out, start right up. If you can make a good schedule during the lesson, it will pay off dividends in the future. Out of the 4 or 5 kids I have started from scratch this term, they are all using the bow and starting to use fingers - most WITHOUT finger tapes, actually. I'm really impressed with that. And they are all reading music - I'm not teaching a single kid by rote and I think the strategy is paying off, so far. We'll see how far these students get by the end of summer term.

I'll get to the kinds of school classes I have in a future post.