AIBU - violin teacher dumped us on the first lesson

[DesperateSusans]

We are new to the area. My daughter (age 7) desperately wants to learn the violin. We asked at her new school and they gave us the information about the local violin teacher who teaches in the local schools and privately.

we contacted the teacher and arranged the lesson. Everything went really well, DD loved it and the teacher was great with us.

I have since received a text message from the teacher which I am confused about.

something along the lines of - great to meet you earlier, on reflection I think a different teacher may be more suited to working with DD. I immediately asked her what she meant. She then went on to say that she felt uncomfortable about the amount of questions I asked with regards to her qualifications, experience and teaching methods and made her feel uncomfortable! Apparently all of this is on her website (I hadn’t looked) and she felt like I was interviewing her!

surely this can’t be right? Isn’t it normal for parents to ask questions when they engage the services of a private tutor?

Let us know how your grovelling goes @DesperateSusans

Firstly you should have looked at her website and asked her questions only if the website did not cover that topic.

Secondly, I suspect it was the way you phrased your questions and the tone you used with her.

You have been given clear feedback that you made her uncomfortable. I would be reflecting on my behaviour if I had been given that feedback.

@SanctusInDistress ex concert violinist here, I never had my parents at any of my private lessons, that would have been thought of very strange!

LOL. My daughter had a music scholarship. We are in your general area. Been there and done that.

Yes, parents can be crazy (and usually are worse in primary school, ironically) but so are many of the school based teachers we encountered. Perhaps we had bad luck but especially if they've been ruling the roost in a particular institution for a while it's very hard to exit your child from the relationship without some sort of blow back around the groups etc. The general 'politics' in music departments can be unbelievable. One of my DCs (not the music scholar) thankfully played an instrument NOT taught in schools generally and we have a wonderful teacher who has become a mentor. That has made it harder to get involved in the school groups, which is a shame, though. On the other hand, my DC music scholar got trapped in two teaching relationships which weren't great and affected her enjoyment in a big way, both school teachers. She had a wonderful teacher who mostly taught adults outside of school but whose travelling schedule with concerts made it untenable, which is a shame. ED to say: Therefore we had to use the school one.

Tricky OP - you might also have had a lucky escape. Think about how you are coming across, for sure, but we were sacked by a teacher too in a horrible way. I will never forget my daughter pitching up with a piece she wanted to play after just completing a hard exam and finding out about her scholarship and getting absolutely slated. "YOU CAN PLAY BETTER THAN THIS!" Complete mentalist.

One of our teachers won’t teach without a parent for under tens as she feels the parent can reinforce the technique as explained as well as better remember comments around dynamics etc so that it filters through to their practice. She’s a great teacher. So everyone is a little different.

Yes. Fwiw I’m not sure you wouldn’t actually be better off with a fresh start. But I hope you get a positive response for taking on board the comments. Not everyone is that big.

Wow, lots of rules you have there.

"Firstly you should have looked at her website and asked her questions only if the website did not cover that topic."

FFS - maybe join the human race? People do actually speak to each other in person, you know?

I have spent decades around music as I play the piano. I have no professional qualifications in music, but regularly meet and perform with other pianists, many of whom are teachers / students at major conservatories.

Again and again I hear "ABRSM is better" from parents of "musical" children. It's almost a dog whistle.

The thing is that virtually non of them can offer any answer to the question "Why is ABRSM better?" ...?

Personally, I think its dreadfully old fashioned and puts a ridiculous over emphasis on technical exercise. I think theirvchoice of repertoire is very poor. They often choose bizarre editions of established pieces. The worst example of this was probably a Chopin walz in grade 8 a few years back. God only knows where they found that edition, but it had several strange differences to the generally accepted version. What composers did / did not write 200 years ago is a matter of intense academic debate. Conservatoire students would be expected to understand this, and to use this information to justify their approach to performance. But to expect teenagers to engage with a bizarre early edition of a work from the standard romantic repertoire was insane. Many teachers told their students not to attempt this piece, and I know of one who never used ABRSM again.

Often the "ABRSM is better" crowd will find a piece in another syllabus and say "trinity say its grade 6 but ABRSM say its only grade 4", then smile smughly at each other as they've just proved to themselves how much better ABRSM is and how they've made the right decision to put their children through ABRSM exams.

This all makes perfet sense ... at least to someone who isn't a musician. I know things are changing (slowly) but ABRSM has almost always valued note accuracy and technical skills above musical expression and creativity. Whilst this may serve a small group of highly talented children very well, it can suck the enjoyment of music out of more normal children.

There are other exam boards (Trinity is a good example) that are simply streets ahead of them. There are even exam boards which give the choice to play an improvised and individual arrangement of a child's favourite song. This is an approach that really encourages creativity and artistic expression, which is what music is really about.

Surely it's normal to Google them?

There's nothing big about discovering there are no other violin teachers locally (having argued at length on this thread she'd done and said nothing wrong) and then writing a 'grovelling' email.

Well the violin teacher clearly felt interrogated so maybe "FFS people speak to each other" wasn't the best course of action in this case.

Maybe you are the OP😂

Well of course not. But if you are on the internet - which, by definition of this thread, the OP is - then that is your first port of call.

Sceptic - the schools often strongly reinforce this ABRSM malarky. 100%. And if you're a parent like me with a child who is musical and you aren't especially (or like me didn't grow up in a country where exams are so common) you do sort of rely on this advice? Often they only offer one exam board too.

I don't disagree parents 'drink the Kool Aid' so to speak and get het up about it but in my experience the schools/teaching professionals around children can contribute to the general mayhem.

Never ceases to amaze me that a fairly innocuous post always devolves into name-calling on this site! Ironically, I think the name-callers sound like much more ‘hard work’ than any of the ops I’ve seen- can’t imagine jumping straight to nastiness as a grown adult. Weird!

Yes. Because most would put on their website:” I am a moderately effective teacher with four year’s experience of piano teaching since I was fired from a local school and 32 years of slightly prurient interest in adolescent children , particularly dark haired, brown eyes boys of slim build around age 11.”

You are best off with word of mouth.

I'm really not. I am out the other end of all of this and this thread reminds my why that is such a relief!

Totally.

You're 100% right, but not everyone in the music world thinks so highly of ABRSM. Having said that, they are slowly changing.

Edited : Just to reiterate, I am not a piano teacher, this is just my opinion. ABRSM can be good for some children.

This would be good but I don't know how realistic it is for most schools to be able to offer multiple boards in the same instruments. Anyway, this is something for another thread!

This is an incredibly insightful answer. I honestly didn't know the context, DC has always followed the ABRSM as that's what their school/teachers have suggested.

I'm now thinking Trinity might be better for them. Other people, when they've heard DC play, especially their own, composed pieces, always seem quite amazed (we're not a music family btw or pushy with exam grades) but never quite gets the Merit etc in exams as they are not 'technically' perfect.

As a non-musical (in the sense that I have no education in it), I sometimes listed to school performances and a piece might be 'perfect' but so, so soulless. It's like that child, and I think sometimes this is driven by parents/culture, has spent months perfecting the piece but it's just automatic.

Then another child comes on and me and DH look at each other with amazement as we're so gripped and engaged with the performance (and this is not only because there might be a Chopin v jazz piece e.g.) and find out that person is 2-3 grades below the former. What I'm saying here probably makes no sense but then I'm most definitely not one of 'those music parents'. ;)

I think Trinity does allow you to substitute one of your own composition for one of the set pieces. You'd need advice from a teacher as the pieces has to be at an appropriate standard. If they still do this I think it's fantastic.

Once again .... I am not a piano teacher!

Children can be pushed to press on with the grades when they really should be having a pause. So, the child you've heard may be clinging onto the technical aspects of that piece for dear life in the recital.

My DCs attended a primary school where @Sceptic1234 you will probably be horrified to hear the singing teacher pushed the children to grade 6 (I think it's the highest) before their voices had even changed. How they actually performed on the test wasn't even considered properly - just get 'em through another one. I am not sure how many passed the higher grades because I think there was one year at least when an examiner called time. The fact she was even attempting floored me. We weren't a choir school so maybe it's not that unusual but seemed crazy considering the children were still developing physically.

The child was on her very first lesson, as a complete beginner, and the mother was asking about exams. This tells me exactly what type of parent OP is. Push push push. Achieve, achieve. achieve. I am paying therefore I expect results. I bet if she got 9/10 in a spellings test, the first question would be 'oh which one did you get wrong then?'
Let the poor kid have some fun and enjoy music.

The website thing is a bit odd. In my job and volunteer roles I get asked questions which are answered on the website all the time! It's what people do; hardly a reason not to want to deal with them again.

Absolutely!. I wouldn't ask all that for teaching a 7 year old unless she is going to be performing professionally.