The following is a response that I put on that interminable ‘Watkins on youtube thread’ which has wandered more than the Mississippi. I thought it would make a good topic for a new thread. This is in no way a veiled attempt to bash any one method or group of teachers. As I said on my post on the ‘Watkins thread’ there are good and bad teachers in all methods. And for those of us who teach students who have come from other teachers, I’d be interested in hearing what problems students have brought you from other teachers. My aim in posing this question is to give students, particularly new students to the harp, some guidelines in figuring out if they are studying with a good or a bad teacher. Here’s what I wrote on the other thread.

A good teacher will actively teach you how to get around the instrument, produce a clear strong tone, have a wide dynamic range, dexterity and speed. A good teacher will guide you systematically into harder repertoire by small logical steps in a logical progression. Most importantly, a good teacher will customize a technique to your hand and your abilities, drawn from his/her years of experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. A good teacher will be a strict school marm at the beginner level so that you don’t have a lot of bad habits to unlearn later on. A good teacher will encourage you to hear other players, to attend gatherings of harpists, both locally and nationally, so that you develope a larger sense of the harp community and so that you hear many different ways of playing the instrument.

A bad teacher will either tie you into knots with dogma about how ‘This is the ONLY way to play the harp,” or will sit back and let you do anything at all with your hands so that the next teacher that you have, if you haven’t given up the instrument in despair and frustration, will have to spend two years untangling the mess the previous teacher allowed to develope. A bad teacher will skip levels of difficulty and give you pieces to work on that are way beyond you, and on which you will work for 8, 10, or 12 months or more, all the while telling you how beautifully you are doing. A bad teacher in point of fact can’t really play the instrument very well him/herself. A bad teacher will isolate you, telling you that changing to a teacher who plays another method will’ruin’ you. A bad teacher doesn’t encourage you to hear anybody else, or to participate in any way with other harpists. And a bad teacher spends a great deal of time bad-mouthing other harpists and teachers.