Posted by Jay Bertolet on December 06, 2001 at 11:53:53:
In Reply to: Grosser injustices posted by Kenneth Sloan on December 06, 2001 at 01:13:55:
I had this student once who attended the performing arts high school I teach at. He was studying tuba and I started him on the same two etude books (Tyrrell & Bordogni) that I use with every other student I've ever had. He would never practice. I mean that in all seriousness, he would absolutely never practice. For a whole semester, we worked (and I use that term loosely) on the first exercise in each book. It took half a school year for him to finish both studies and even then, he never could play the first Tyrrell correctly. He would come in for his lessons and start to play one of the studies. He would crash and burn, quite literally falling apart after only a few measures. I would ask him if he practiced and he would say no. I would ask him to try again and he would start, fall apart again, and then start to cry. I tried to convince him that practicing the studies was pretty much the only way he was going to get any better at them but he never took my advice. Instead he blamed me, claiming I was way too demanding a teacher and that I expected the impossible from him. One particular situation I remember was, I think, during the first semester. We had a 2.5 week break between lessons because of Thanksgiving vacation. I told him before the break that he should spend a lot of time practicing over the vacation because he would have a lot of time off from school. When he came back to his next lessons, he sounded just as awful as before. I asked him if he had practiced and he said no. I asked why and he told me that he didn't have time to practice because he had to go buy a suit for a Sunday church service during the vacation.
Now, here's the injustice: I gave him the grades he deserved, considering that he never worked on the tuba except in lessons and ensembles. He blamed me for his problems and decided after one year to switch to bass trombone. He figured that if I wasn't his teacher, he would be just fine. He started his second year on bass trombone, and the same thing happened with the trombone teacher. While he was studying with the trombone teacher, he went all over the county telling prospective students not to come to study with me because I was an awful teacher and a real nasty person. Thankfully, the school finally washed him out of the program and he's now back in a regular high school where he belongs. To this day, he still tells others I was overly hard on him and I'm a bad teacher. Go figure.
My opinion for what it's worth...