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Re: Stealing Students

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Home Forums Teaching the Harp Stealing Students Re: Stealing Students

#88020

But how can you teach effectively if you do not have, to some degree, control over the student? If you are offering a progression of ideas, they are dependent on consistency, and other input interferes with that consistency, even input from past teachers. A lesson requires controlling the experience, what is worked on and when and how much, and that is as much what we are paid for as our knowledge. It takes a lot of skill. Students who come in thinking they know it all have an attitude that prevents them from learning. Even if they simply have a preconceived notion as to how the teacher should be teaching them in particular, it does a disservice as it is not allowing the teacher to develop their approach. And then, with the ideas you are trying to instill in the student, if they go out an meet other harpists and pick up their ideas, then your work gets polluted, and you have to start over again on many things. Control is an essential element of teaching, however benign or passive or discreet. Or overt. Even determining what your student listens to is part of helping the development of what their conception of the harp is to be. Why? Because all of the art in playing the harp is in how you listen to it and what you expect from it. And the student needs to give the teacher the gift of time to let their work unfold and grow. It should be