Teaching

[Flamin Lip]

How many of y'all have students? How much do ya charge?.... Just started teaching. I charge 30 an hr. has been fun so far.

The parents are worse than the kids. The students and I want to rock out and have fun, but the folks want "deep theory" BUMMER!

Any advice or horror stories?

[azraelswings]

I taught lessons my senior year of High School at a local music shop. They charged $15 for a half hour lesson. Teachers got $10.

Advice:

1. When you do talk to parents, ask them to be encouraging, and to gently remind their kids to practice. This way, they'll progress more regularly, keeping the student happy and the parent willing to keep paying for lessons.

2. If parents want them to learn theory/sight-reading/blahblahblah, and the kid is too old to be bothered with the silly Mel Bay guitar methods, give A modern method for guitar by William Leavitt on Berkelee Press a shot. Its challenging but rewarding.

3. Outline an attendance/missed lesson policy in advance. Make sure its understood and taken seriously. People ditching you wastes your time and is generally uncool.

4. I found that asking students for a song they'd like to work on a week in advance was best. This way you could give it a listen, and devote more lesson time to teaching it than tabbing it.

Hope thats some help.

[Kasey]

i charge $10 for a half hour lesson. I think the main trick is patience, at least with me because all of my students right now are 13 or younger. I have one seven year old student who has serious ADHD... it's not fun.

[juststartingout]

I have taught for many years, anyone from 10 y/o to 40 y/o people. The biggest thing in my opinion, is you have to make it fun and the student needs to progress quickly. If they don't, they get bored and drop it. I always start out with 12 bar blues and the blues scale for lead. It's simple and anyone can play it with little practice and it explains what a scale is. From there you can take them into other scales, or reading tabs, or going with standard notation.

Telling the parents this, will satasfy there need for theory and the kids need to be able to play and make music.

[Nick The Man]

i was a student but i quit lessons
drum lessons, but i think all lessons are pretty similar


let me tell you why so you do the same as my teacher

1. teach things that are actually interesting and as a side dish throw in some basics and boring stuff (in a guitar teachers cases maybe give him/her like 1 or 2 scales and a cool song to learn)

2. make sure you encourage the student!!!! that was something my teacher definitely lacked

3. never make the student feel uncomfortable! another thing my teacher didnt know


im sure there is other things

if i think of them i will post more

[busyboy]

I have been teaching for over ten years. My students are very attached to me. Often I end up teaching a student's brother or sister- sometimes running through a whole family. Here's why:

Teach the kids music they want to learn. There's always some theory hidden in there. Be very encouraging and keep it low pressure. Once a kid can play songs by bands and players they admire, they're hooked. From there you can go anywhere. I have students that started with punk and now play in the High School Jazz band. I have a student that began to write her own songs and I worked with her on songwriting and, later audio production.

Oh yeah, be sure to talk to the kid too. I always start off a lessong with "Give me the good news. What happened this week?". It's important to be interested in your students.

[punkin]

There's a fine line between keeping the self gratification up for the student which translates into interest which in turn nets more practice. I like to work on popular or familiar songs then break down the tune into it's theoretical parts. That way both missions are accomplished. I do the same thing to get the kids to learn scales and chords...by breaking down their favorite tunes.

[noisedude]

Getting good songs is tough. So many times I'll want to use a song that a kid likes, but for the drummers it'll have a couple of false stops they can't count, or it'll have a new kind of barre chord or picking style the guitarists haven't done yet. If you can nail the material, you're 75% there. After that it's being nice and getting along well.

I struggle with getting my boundaries back in - I've relaxed my teaching style over the last couple of years after three or four years of trying to teach 'like a grownup'. The problem now is that I can end up chatting to a kid for half an hour and playing for like five minutes.


PS - Busyboy - to see how to use italics (and bold, for that matter), quote this post. You basically put an 'i' or a 'b' or 'u' in square brackets, and then put '/i' or '/b' or '/u' in square brackets [like these] when you want to switch it off again. You'll find it much quicker than reaching for the mouse and getting outsmarted by the BBS software ...

[kikkis]

Have been teaching for about 8 years now. I charge about $40AUD an hour.
Kids and teenagers are great, talking to them helps me stay young. Teaching adults on the other hand is very trying. I can totally understand their impatience however, if I tried getting tennis lessons or something I'd go through the same thing.
With kids under 12, I teach them 'by the book' if you like. Teenagers, they are more interested in learning songs they listen to (I even had one guy wanting to learn stuff that he could 'show off with' when he went to music shops to try guitars).
I've got a question too - do you think its possible to 'teach' someone to play in time? I've seriously had students who couldn't even tap their foot to a metronome in time...