Some rules for The Singing Lesson Teacher

Years ago I drew up a set of “working rules” for the teacher which I had found very useful, and I give them herewith:
1. Make your students like you.
2. Be sure your students trust you and your method.
3. Acknowledge that your students may grow beyond you some day; give them leeway; keep an open mind.
4. Put all the pleasure and inspiration you get out of your own singing into your teaching.
5. Do not promise miracles in a short time. As you and your students are not infallible, it is best to make haste slowly.
6. Encourage helpful mental and physical habits in your students. Accuracy, initiative, ambition will make your students famous, and yourself as well.
7. Be vitally interested in your students’ work, and they will be vitally interested in your instruction.
8. Give them the best you have.

I have found that there are unfortunate cases when student and teacher are simply not congenial, although each may, in his own way, be competent and sincere. When this happens, student and teacher criticize each other unduly, because they don’t understand each other and their temperaments are unsuited.

In such cases I really think it is best that they part, for the student will learn elsewhere with a teacher more suitable to his personality, and the teacher, who is probably eminently successful with other students, will be spared the unhappiness that inevitably results when a student does not progress under his guidance.

The competent teacher does all he can to stimulate confidence in his students. For lack of confidence in a teacher can completely undo any good instruction that may be offered. A teacher cannot give a voice. He can only teach as far as the student is able and willing to comprehend and accept.If many a student who bewails slow improvement were to analyze his own case, he would find that he himself is his worst handicap.

We would say that anyone who continually went to a restaurant and ordered a full and expensive meal, and then didn’t eat it, was mad. Yet many students think they are being smart if they go to a teacher, pay for their lessons, yet do not accept or put to any use the instruction they receive. I have known students who studied with two teachers at one time, with the idea that what they received from one would supplement the instruction from the other, or perhaps one would nullify the other’s harmful instruction. This is absurd as well as disloyal, and such a student is best out of any serious teacher’s studio.

A student who cannot take criticism is wasting both time and money. Yet tears and sulks and anger are so often the answer to criticism that one wonders whether singers are especially sensitive people or if they have perhaps confused the word temper with temperament. The only course, in such a case, is to have a serious talk with the student to find out just where the trouble lies. This talk will often clear up matters of method or criticism, and make the atmosphere between the student and teacher infinitely more comfortable.