Yes, it is important to remember, studying for years and being a good player doesn’t mean you can teach. Being able to do something, and being able to teach someone else how to do it, are two very different things.

Ideally if you want to be a teacher you should study not only how to play, but music education as well. At the very least you should work with an established teacher to see how they do it.

I knew someone who started teaching after only

I think it is important to maintain high standards for our field and for ourselves. The overall quality of harp playing suffers easily when players who are not sufficiently trained call themselves professionals or teachers. What is sufficient is in some ways an individual decision. I have taught on and off for twenty-nine years. In the last five years, I think that I really know what I am doing, and at the same time realize how much more I need to learn.

A harp teacher should have solid, if not fine, technique, good musicality, and at least a general knowledge of music theory, history, and the harp literature. A teacher must know how to demonstrate and teach proper playing in an effective manner. A teacher should have an extensive knowledge of harp literature and an extensive music collection.

I think one should study to at least the master’s level unless extremely accomplished at the undergraduate level, and with a major teacher for more than four years. There is no set time span for harp study, I think one should study until done, not by degrees.

You don’t need a master’s in harp performance to teach harp. However, I do agree that you need to have a teaching degree of some sort and a lot of experience teaching others. Many people are wonderful performers and don’t have a clue how to teach someone — especially someone who doesn’t think the same way they do. It doesn’t take a college degree to become familiar with harp repertoire….just lots and lots of listening and reading. Also a teacher should have a good technique themselves because modeling is often necessary. Yeah, there are a lot of fakes out there……it’s in every field. I know of a person who bills himself “Maestro” so and so and can’t play his way out of a paper bag….organist. Not sure which instrument has more fakes teaching though….voice seems to be another common genre that people think they can teach without the proper training themselves. It’s irritating.

Briggs

I think it is important to keep in perspective- how much maths training is needed to teach maths to primary school kids?

Don’t they offer pedagogy degrees there? It sounds like a terrible music ed course that is offered. I did a double major of music ed and performance, but over and over again I heard professors tell students you must be an excellent musician and proficient on your own instrument in order to be a good teacher. I so agree with that. Maybe my comment that you need a music degree in education was based on my own history in the 80’s. Have things changed that much? Perhaps they have…..if so….terribly sad.

Briggsie

The problem is not that all music ed programs or majors are bad but that a lot of schools including the ones I went to encouraged people who failed performance auditions to come anyway as a music ed. and then re-audition the next year. While those of us who passed the auditions were subjected to very strict standards of playing, the music-ed.er’s learned a lot about pedagogy and didn’t have many standarads for their playing (no juries, few performance requirements). For instance we had to give two full, memorized recitals in our undergrad. Those people who were music ed majors only had to give a half-hour, non-memorized recital. This disparity in standards is really a problem.

It is standard in the US for anyone studying at a University that the teacher now has at least a Master’s in Performance.

One thing about the post comparing the Ginastera and Twinkle Twinkle. There is a reason that 4th graders don’t teach 3rd grade. It’s not because they haven’t learned the material or that they can’t teach it back. It’s because they don’t yet understand exactly where the material fits in to later material; they can’t teach it as a foundation.

You study long and hard, mastering your instrument so that when you teach you understand the path your students are going to take because you are much farther along on it. It’s like becoming a monk. You don’t go to a monastery and learn from a monk one year ahead of you or two years ahead of you. You learn from a master who understands the path you’re on. Also, sometimes when you learn a piece you know it but you don’t know it as well as you do years later. That’s just human progress. So always we will have that in our performing and teaching but it is an even bigger reason to hold off on teaching until you really are quite far from the beginning level.

Mr.S is right, too. When I first started teaching I had to do a lot of observation of my teacher’s lessons. It was really helpful. Talking to and watching other harpists is also helpful.

It’s too bad about the performance situation at your school. I did not have this problem at my schools but the music ed thing was a huge problem, in fact it was kind of a joke. We would occassionally meet music ed people who were really gifted. For the most part, though, it was kind of a joke that they could play at all.

I believe that you have to be very good at your instrument to teach, although being good doesn’t equate to being a good teacher. A lot of people, good or bad at the instrument, just teach to hear themselves talk. But a good teacher is a good performer who knows how to explain concepts clearly and effectively so they become the basis for a growing student.

One problem with harp performance degrees is that they don’t usually have a pedagogy class and often when they do it’s simply a trashy, catch-all class that covers everything that hasn’t been covered somehwere else. So you learn about harp maintenance and string tying one week, editing music another, composing another, teaching maybe but not much and certainly not much practical experience, and sometimes gigging and maybe even a statement on ethics (like it’s a small world, be careful … etc.). A lot of majors don’t have the literature or pedagogy classes that other instruments do and it puts these students at a loss, and that puts the entire instrument at a loss .

The biggest problem with harp, though, is that people think it’s rare so they are very trusting when they meet someone who “teaches” the harp even if that person has no business even owning a harp. So there are totally unqualified people teaching, semi-qualified people teaching, and qualified people teaching, but maybe like another post said, this occurs in all genres.