Last week I had a little bit of a showdown with one student. He had come to the dress rehearsal for the recital (the weekend before) and had obviously not practiced. I couldn't let him play his piece, so I asked him to play Perpetual Motion instead, a Book 1 piece that he uses for warmup. His technique looks wonderful when he plays it, and I wanted a beginning student who is just about to play Perpetual Motion to see it played really well in recital.
Well, we didn't get to hear Perpetual Motion because he didn't come to the recital. When I returned home after the recital, I listened to a message from his mother on the answering machine, saying that they weren't going to come to the recital because it would be "embarrassing for him and for us to play that piece. We'll talk." So much for teaching valuable lessons. And how is it OK to blame the teacher in a case like that?
Fortunately, by the time I saw him for his lesson, things had calmed down somewhat. "There's nothing embarrassing about playing a piece with excellent technique," I said to him and his father. And as I said it, I understood why I've had so much trouble improving this student's technique: he doesn't practice it because he doesn't value it. And then he improves sooooo slowly, and has to play the same piece all year because he's not practicing it. We talked about it. "Yeah, my last teacher didn't really do technique," he said. So then a perfectly good violinist is sent up through the Suzuki books without learning technique, learning the pieces more and more slowly, until he gets to a piece where he needs a lot of technique to be able to play it but isn't used to valuing technique, so he can't play it, and he stops practicing. Thinking about it now, I'm sure this happens a lot (but it shouldn't...how can there be violin teachers who don't teach technique! Yikes!)
So now I'm trying to figure out whether I'm nuts, because this is what I proposed: we will take a break from the Suzuki repertoire for the summer. I will pack him full of technique using songs that he knows. At the end of the summer, we'll return to the Suzuki repertoire and assess progress. This requires a lot of work on my part (which is why I think I'm nuts), but it also could be really fun and cool and might help other students too (which is why I think I'm not nuts).
Anyhoo, this is how I come to find myself online, researching Wolfmother for my metal-loving violin student. Yessah.