Dialectic dialogues between adolescent guitarists learning music outside school
Teenagers learning guitar. How do you teach them in a high school setting? I taught high school guitar classes for nine years and 10-week courses at a community college for two years. I was interim guitar teacher at a university for two years, also. I learned to become familiar with disappointing students at the start and along the way. I taught basic beginning guitar to most. Most wanted to rock out. So many obstacles entered the picture right there at the start. Students didn’t have the same or adequate equipment to begin. There were assumptions on their part about what guitar was appropriate to begin to play; small hands and big instruments, action height of the strings, toy instruments mistaken for real ones, etc. How do you start teaching a guitar class? You (can) set standards and expectations from the beginning. This will assuredly disenchant and disappoint so many would-be students. Eh, you’ll probably never meet them anyway because they read your syllabus or heard from a ...