You cannot teach well without caring both about the subject matter and the student. It must be both. You cannot teach well without carefully considering the ramifications and results of how you teach. Students should be cared for by their teachers, period. Students need to be taught well, and properly, and their teachers must not ever take ridiculous shortcuts. That is uncaring to the teacher and the subject matter/tradition of whatever you are teaching.

All too often we see students come to us who have studied with somebody who unfortunately set them off on a tragic trajectory. Just recently, I spoke with someone who had been taking lessons somewhere else and with someone else, someone who had them using stickers with the names of the notes on the keys of their piano, had them writing the names of the notes in on their music, absolutely no regard for learning the instrument or music itself. They were just trying to get this person to be able to pluck the right notes on their piano (by following the stickers), and therefore making it seem like they were making music and understanding well, while really they were just connecting the dots and following stickers. Unsurprisingly, this person was extremely upset and almost scared when they learned what they really have to learn to be able to understand and make music well. And that is tragic. They shouldn’t have to go through that!

I feel terrible of course that they went through this and it’s tragic that they likely spent a significant amount of money on this charlatan! But of course I did everything I could to encourage them and say look you’re in a good place now, and we can help you, and we can get through this, but it’s going to take a little time and patience. Please, if you’re studying music somewhere online, through like some website or YouTube, or with a teacher even, and you have any questions about whether you’re on the right track, drop us a line I’d be happy to chat over the phone about it and just be a third party observer to let you know if it sounds like you’re even on the right track. We don’t want people getting swindled! We don’t want people scared! We want people loving music and finding joy in it.