Dear Alma, My teacher humiliates me
OrchestrasDear Alma,
My teacher made a public display of me in studio class today and I froze with nervousness. He was not happy with my intonation, and and instead of phrasing it in a constructive manner, he said, “You played it in tune before why are you so out of tune today? Did you practice?” I don’t know how to respond to leading questions like that in lessons and especially in front of colleagues.
Please help!
Traumatized Musician
Dear Traumatized Musician,
We have all been there – most likely both as the recipient of unwanted advice in public, and as a witness of a teacher being harsh to a student. You may have just gotten the short end of the stick and have an overly critical or insensitive teacher. Have you noticed similar behavior towards other students, or do you feel as if this is directed only at you?
The bare truth of the matter is that classical music is a harsh environment. It’s very competitive, can be incredibly stressful, takes an inordinate amount of time and energy, and compares people in public. It’s almost impossible to not take criticism personally, but we have to do everything we can to take a step back, a deep breath.
Traumatized Musician – I have an uncomfortable question for you. Do you agree with the teacher’s assessment? If so, listen to the teacher, and ask them for help to find a way to correct the flaw. No matter how annoyed you are at these comments, listen to the criticism in a calm way and then brainstorm a way to fix the problem.
Stay positive. You are there to learn and to train yourself for a career. In this particular case, your learning may not be about your instrument, but rather how to navigate situations and persist and stay strong when you are feeling insulted or belittled.
Criticism is not about trying to make you feel bad. This teacher might have been asking a straight-forward question. Examine that question. What about your practicing didn’t work under pressure? How can you stay solid under pressure? It is the type of practice, the amount, or the the at your body reacts to stress that you can investigate? Do you need to perform more often to be able to control your technique?
Ask your teacher for advice. Work hard. Work differently. Take this moment as an opportunity. It’s not a door closed in your face, but a chance to open a new door and find a new path.
Questions for Alma? Please put them in the comments section or send to DearAlmaQuery@gmail.com
A teacher questioning if you practiced is a perfectly legitimate question. If this upsets you, perhaps it’s not the career for you…
Yes James – agreed. I hope the teacher can also help the student with nerves. Seems like that might be the bigger issue here.
Traumatized? Oh puhlease!
I find both question and answer pretty senseless. If a student has such a reaction to such a basic comment being made in public, he/she should give up the idea of learning an instrument or find a more agreeable teacher. And if a teacher suggests that because a student once before played a passage in tune, they cannot have lapses, he/she should not be in the business of teaching!
Nick2 – some students have thin skin. It can get thickened. Maybe this will help that situation. It’s tough out there, they need to get tougher.
Jeez, if you can’t learn to take feedback and be interrogated on your professional practice when you are a student then you stand no chance in the real world. Toughen up, grow up and get some backbone and build your resilience. Stop expecting to be molly-coddled and wrapped in cotton wool your whole life. Success is what you make it and that takes constant hard work. You might have a talent, but you are not that great, not yet at least. So the questioning was totally legitimate. Get used to it. A world class conductor will do the same to you in front of an entire orchestra one day, that’s if you get to that level – which you won’t do unless you practice.
*Traumatized viola player.
Public humiliation in front of one’s peers is not the best way to encourage a young musician to be more attentive to their intonation. While the teacher is highlighting an issue that the student needs to elevate, and rightly so, it is also their responsibility to do so with decorum and empathy. A teacher is doing much more than just imparting advice concerning instrumental playing.
Decorum and empathy is wasted on students who maybe should not be there anyway
Stephen – yes. Some teachers seem to be burned out and frustrated and take it out on their students. It’s also possible that the teacher was frustrated during lessons and just needed to say something direct.
At my conservatory, I am triggered and traumatized by any demand on me to improve. I literally cry and shake so much, I need to put my instrument down and seek a safe space to recover.
Maybe you need a therapy animal of some description as well to help improve your mental health (serious suggestion).
Maybe time to look into a non-performance option for music? There are a lot of options from management to non-profit…
I hope you have your Comfort Dog handy!! It’s alarming how precious Americans are now. Oh, I feel a change comin’ on!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sounds familiar… though i improved the most under such a teacher.
Snowflake
Exactly — student from the generation that was never, ever crossed. Parents either praised them unduly — “how brilliant of you, Neville, to put your cup on the table” — or “negotiated” with them when they had put their fists through a wall. Teachers afraid for their jobs to tell them to shut off their bloody cell phones in class, or even to shut up if they were gossiping, let alone to discuss with them their theory that Lord of the Rings was a greater work of literature than any of Shakespeare. Coaches having to give some sort of prize to every entrant in a race. University professors obliged to give them pass marks when their papers were turned in with illiterate spelling, grammar and punctuation, and totally misunderstanding ideas.
Welcome to the world.
Disturbingly there are people who ‘down tick’ such sensible comments. Snowflakery is an all-consuming neurotic trait and it will surely end careers before they’ve begun.
“You played it in tune before why are you so out of tune today? Did you practice?”
You have have straightforward answers for both of those.
– “Because I’m nervous.”
– “Yes, I practiced (or no, i didn’t practice).”
If you practiced but aren’t better then… “Improvement doesn’t always come in regular batches.”
That will probably be taken as sassy, but it’s the truth.
However, on this specific topic of INTONATION… nearly every music teacher I’ve ever encountered had little or no clue about how to teach intonation other than to deeply intone, “You must LEARN to use your EAR, ” or “listen…Listen… LISTEN…”
Those are slogans, not pedagogy.
Intonation can be taught in a methodical way, there are curriculums, yet almost no one does it.
Most teachers imagine intonation to be like pubic hair… they think it will inevitably develop, and therefore their efforts need be no more than to complain if it hasn’t arrived yet.
But if they’re just standing around waiting… what are we paying them for?
Just have a good cry about it and work on your intonation.
OK, a stint in the military for you. Then come back and complain about feeling ‘humiliated’!! Absolute groan.
As a string player myself, there is something that we should all remember when it comes to intonation:
We ALL play out of tune when learning a passage; be it simple melodies, double stops (2 notes at once), or anything fast or slow. Let’s keep in mind that string fingerboards do not have frets like those on a guitar.
Choose a fingering that will sound the LESS “out of tune” in comparison to other fingerings, and you will eventually play MORE “in tune” with yourself and others.
Teachers have the same set of ears as everyone elses, so their professional guidance should not to be taken personally. They also played out of tune when they first picked up an instrument !
Our hands are all shaped differently, so find a fingering that works and sounds the best for you, and your teacher’s comments will no longer be the focus of the problem.
In fact, every string player plays every piece in a 31-tone tuning system. It is a matter of differentiation.
Hearing poor intonation is indeed traumatizing, start again.
The photo is of an esteemed, kind, and talented middle-school orchestra director in suburban Washington, D.C. who would probably rather die than humiliate a student.
(If I’m not mistaken, it appeared in an issue of Teaching Music, a publication of NAfME, some years ago. How does it come to be used here?)
So many commenters don’t actually know what it means to be a good teacher. Does the accusatory “You’re out of tune when you’ve played this passage well before, didn’t you practice?” help the performing student or the observing students to understand the cause of the intonation issues? Not one bit! It denigrates the performer’s work ethic unnecessarily in front of their peers, with no basis but a passage being performed less optimally than previously, which is reasonably expected in an academic setting. A better observation which would benefit all parties could be, “you’ve played this passage before with fewer issues, let me walk you through how you can practice this and similar passages of other repertoire to improve your intonation and consistency.” This provides actionable instruction for the performer in the specific and for the observing students, something they can apply to their own repertoire.
That the teacher did not do so highlights a failing in their pedagogical skillset. They also have given their student further reason to feel nervous in the studio setting in the future. It is hard to learn when one feels one must defend themselves and their work ethic. That the teacher was insensitive to their responsibility to foster a healthy and safe learning environment shows a deficit of empathy for their students.