The Eager Student

Every student has different goals they hope to reach through lessons. It's very important to me that I help each student reach their goals, big or small, both short-term and long-term. Let's talk about the eager students with big goals. How do I approach their lessons? I do things a little differently when teaching eager students, as opposed to more casual ones.

Number of Assignments

- One of the most important duties of any private music teacher is to determine how many assignments to give each student. Students shouldn't have too many or too few assignments. There are several factors that play into determining the proper workload for each student, but this blog entry only focuses on one: eagerness. The more eager a student, the more assignments I give them. It's that simple. This rule applies so long as the eager student continues to successfully complete all weekly assignments.

Level of Difficulty

- It's up to me to determine how difficult my students' assignments should be. Regardless of the student, I always assign a mix of both difficult and easy homework. This way students will get a confidence boost from tackling the easy assignments, which will then translate into momentum when they take on the harder assignments. How do I approach the eager student differently when it comes to assignment difficulty? While I'm still sure to give them some easy assignments, I give them more difficult assignments than I would a casual student.

There you have it: my thoughts on how I handle eager students. First and foremost, drum lessons should always be fun! Eager students tend to have more fun when tasked with a greater number of difficult assignments. I've found this to be true in most cases, but just like with most things in life, there are outliers. I use a different approach for these outliers, but let's save that for another blog.