Once you’ve decided on a book or
books, you need to think carefully about how to make the best use of it. Will you follow it slavishly, playing every
single song and every single exercise?
Will you spend the entire lesson playing from the book? Will you pick and choose – taking parts of
the book to serve the point of the lesson?
What you do is up to you, but at
the beginning of your teaching career I’d recommend following the book. The author will be an experienced
teacher/musician, and will have thought carefully about the order of
progression. The book will usually begin
with how to produce a sound on the instrument and posture. You don’t have to get through these pages in
the first lesson. With the flute, I
don’t usually put the instrument together until at least the second lesson
(maybe the third or fourth). I need to
be sure the student has got a good, consistent sound with just the headjoint,
otherwise, the rest of their playing will sound awful. During these first few lessons I spend the time
in between trying to get a sound by talking about practising, where to store
the flute, basic music theory (stave/crotchets etc), and how to NOT give your
flute to your little sister to play. Or
if something goes wrong to bring the flute to me. Dad is NOT allowed to touch it.
Sorry. Rant over.[1]
I use
the tutor book sparingly in the first 10 or so weeks of playing. It’s more important to establish good habits
in these weeks than it is to churn through pages of the book. Once you get going with the book, it’s
important to make sure the students understand each new concept. In a group lesson I will use a whiteboard to
explain things like time signatures and bars.
In a 1-1 lesson I write it directly in the students’ book. Do be thorough and don’t accept sloppy
playing.
If a
student doesn’t understand a concept, or can’t play the song independently, use
the song as a “study”. Take the
trickiest part of the song and break it down to its core components. Isolate rhythms or tricky fingerings. I don’t recommend moving on in the book until
the student can play the entire song independently. In group lessons this is hard to find a
balance. I’ll discuss this in another
post.
It can
be fun to go over easy songs in the book.
Once in a while (e.g. at the beginning or end of a term) the class and I
will play every song in the book until we can’t go any further. This is great because it means we can see how
far we’ve come (suddenly that “hard” song isn’t all that hard any more) and we
can consolidate all the learning so far.
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