21st Century Guitar Teacher (1)

As in so many walks of life, the greatest change in the pursuit of learning guitar nowadays has been brought about by the sheer amount of information available via the internet.  The music for just about any song is available, together with video lessons to demonstrate, and endless pages of background to every piece of theory or technique imaginable.  A far cry from the 1980s when I began to play.

 

 

Back then, a major part of a guitar teacher's job was issuing this same information little by little to his students.  Students could shortcut (or eliminate) this process by buying books and magazines to teach themselves, or sit patiently in lessons while their teacher painstakingly handwrote the next golden nugget of information to be offered up.

By the time I had begun to teach (casually to friends and their children) in the mid 1990s, not much had changed.  The internet was only just beginning to spread on a mass scale, and the contained knowledge base was primitive by today's standards.

So, I taught like I had been taught (in the 3 or 4 lessons I ever took).  I wrote out the students' next step to work on, demonstrated it, watched them struggle with it a little and answered questions as best I could. Then they were sent off to master the new information, in the expectation they'd return next week ready to move onto the next stage.  Rarely, very rarely was this the case.  Clearly it was their own fault because they weren't practising enough.  At least, it seemed that way to me at the time.

Looking back, aside from being an adept issuer of the information, the only real angle of attack I had for many of the problems at hand was the same angle I had been fed for years from all the teaching sources I had encountered.

Keep doing it and you'll get it!

 

Unfortunately this (for most) was not the case.  As a result, by the turn of the century,  I had a bunch of students who were not progressing making up the majority of my part-time schedule.  I was plagued with cancellations, no shows and students quitting out of the blue.  It was clear if I was to ever make a go of teaching guitar as a profession, I had a lot of learning to do myself.