My Student Did Not Practice Again I am sure the sight of a student who did not practice again was not unfamiliar to many of us teachers. I understand that it is frustrating and could suck the joy of teaching; I do know teachers who threw in the towel because of this. I must admit that it was a sore point at one point of my teaching career, but I decided to adopt a more positive approach because I genuinely wanted all my students to have a positive learning experience. Let me share with you a couple of pointers that hopefully could provide you with better solutions to this issue. · Empathize and diagnose It might be an instinct for many of us to immediately ask “Why didn’t you practice?” in a disapproving tone when faced with a non-practicing student. We might even launch into a tirade chiding student or institute a penalty. Perhaps naively we think that the student would feel bad for disappointing us. But trust me on this, those actions are going to ha...
Random thoughts and musings on piano teaching.