I have met a lot of new students this year. It's great. I have my first lesson for a beginner down to a science. I have my transfer or no formal training but they know some stuff first lesson figured out. I have taught long enough that I generally have a pretty good idea of how to adjust for different learning styles, etc. It's also very challenging. In meeting all these new students, many of them online, I have to continue to adjust how I teach to help each one learn the material. There are some hard and fast "rules" that I have always used that just don't work anymore. Things like "thou shalt not write in all the finger numbers for your song!" and "we will always, always, always learn a new song in every lesson." have gone out the window. Why? Because sometimes you have to change your approach to reach the same goals.
I want my students to be able to read music confidently. This means letters not numbers and as few notes written on the page as possible. But what if a student cannot play without it written in? What if we've been working on the same song for two weeks and the student still is struggling? What if what I have always looked at as a crutch (writing the finger numbers in) is an opportunity to build confidence in the thought process I've been trying to teach? I did it as an experiment with one of my online students this summer. Basically, he's your song. The right hand plays this finger first, the left hand plays this finger first, then what happens? At the beginning, he checked with me before writing in every finger number, but the end of the song, he was writing in entire lines on his own...and doing it correctly! And I was able to hear the thought process that I've been teaching. "That's a skip up from 2, so 4. step down to 3...." Sure. It was with finger numbers instead of notes. Sure, now he'll just look at the finger numbers instead of the notes when he plays. But I can see that he understands the thought process, so we can step it back a bit and not write in ALL the notes, but some of them. Learning these skills is a marathon, not a sprint, and there is nothing wrong with changing your approach to reach the same goals. It's not compromising to take a few extra steps to get to the end goal.
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