{"id":3144,"date":"2011-05-03T21:48:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T02:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amadeusacademy.com\/family\/?p=3144"},"modified":"2011-05-10T14:13:39","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T19:13:39","slug":"a-first-in-my-teaching-career-and-not-a-good-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/?p=3144","title":{"rendered":"A first in my teaching career… and not a good one"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I officially had the worst piano lesson of my career.<\/p>\n

I’m sure I will have many more awful lessons over the years that I plan to continue teaching but this was definitely the worst so far.\u00a0 I had an elementary age student who came in with a poor attitude and it went from bad to worse.\u00a0 He started to blatantly disobey almost everything I was asking him to do.<\/p>\n

So, we only played one<\/span> eight-measure song the entire lesson.\u00a0 Over and over.\u00a0 And over.<\/p>\n

He wouldn’t follow the most basic of instructions, like hold the whole note for 4 counts, or sit up straight.\u00a0\u00a0 When I did stop to correct him he would make snoring noises at me.\u00a0 I honestly got to the point where I didn’t know what I should do.\u00a0 I’ve never had a student have such a disrespectful attitude towards me.<\/p>\n

I was a little taken aback.<\/p>\n

I’ve had problem students in the past but usually a straight-forward “you need to shape up” scold does the trick and then they actually do! \u00a0 I’ve even made students cry in lessons before, but even after that they adjust their attitude.\u00a0 So, I tried to keep my cool and told him I was extremely disappointed with his attitude (along with various other “you need to shape up” talks through the lesson) all to no avail.\u00a0 So I wouldn’t let him play anything else until he played his first song correctly.\u00a0 And he never did.<\/p>\n

Then I made the dreaded trip to the car afterwords to talk with his Mom.\u00a0 Never a fun conversation, but she needed to know.\u00a0 She was apologetic and frustrated.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t a fun lesson.<\/p>\n

Hopefully we’ll have better luck next week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I officially had the worst piano lesson of my career. I’m sure I will have many more awful lessons over the years that I plan to continue teaching but this was definitely the worst so far.\u00a0 I had an elementary age student who came in with a poor attitude and it went from bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3144"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3196,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144\/revisions\/3196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/friesens.inkingmythinking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}