Never Assume!

Just like any other job, certain aspects of teaching become routine.  I generally know when I want to introduce two-octave scales.  Nuances of course may change and evolve with time and more training.  But I am almost never reinventing my entire approach with each student.  This allows me the flexibility to be creative in lessons when necessary but also able to stay on track with progress somewhere in the back of my mind.

What I didn't realize was that with these routines I started to inadvertently assume things.  I taught the parents of my older students how to tune.  Therefore I did not need to reteach tuning to those parents when I started a younger sibling.  But... this unintentionally led to me assuming that all parents knew how to tune.  Or--let me rephrase--I assumed that if they were uncomfortable with tuning they would have asked for guidance.

Wrong.

If there is one thing this pandemic has made clear: never assume.  A student is progressing through repertoire does not necessarily mean that the practice environment is working.  It simply means that some aspects are working.  But how is the whole experience?  Is it a huge fight getting the child to sit down and focus through said repertoire?

Having students not come to my house each day has been very illuminating.  While I do strongly feel that having students come do your studio is still the best way to go, it has let me see broken issues more easily.  Students are more likely to act up when at home working over Zoom and the parents are more likely to react in a fashion that would be typical for the home environment rather than "best behavior mode."

So many, many underlying tensions and issues bubbled up that I realized stemmed from the stress of me assuming the parents knew how to fix the issue.  Life/teaching lesson learned!