Music teaching for me has been quite interesting journey. First, I started as a small time, informal teacher in my own music teacher’s class. I was one of the good students who could sing and play guitar and the class was large. So my teacher decided he could lighten his workload by allowing me to teach the basics and I decided that getting all the girls’ attention and obedience would be a good bargain. Therefore, that’s how my music teaching started.
First thing I learned was that teaching is the best way to learn. To teach, you have to learn something really well. I started paying more attention to every little aspect of playing guitar including the proper finger positions. Proper way to strum, how to properly hold the guitar so that it does not hinder your playing. I had to unlearn a few things and had to really face a lot of bad habits when I taught my students how to do something and found myself making same mistakes.
Therefore, it has been an interesting ride, after I earned a few fans and a few enemies (root cause - girls). However, the girls are just one motivation. As a music teacher, I learned that the guys who took up guitar to impress the girls had no chance of really learning it. It requires so much patience and depth in your commitment that a superficial reason just won't do. So I prefer to believe that the real reason why I played and taught guitar was the love for music.
Another side effect of teaching music is the automatic respect you get in India and Asian countries by being a teacher. The students would have respect for you and would follow your example in some other aspects of life too. So here are my students from my company who assume that I am their career counselor, mentor, a friend and the resident philosopher. As a teacher, I am enjoying being all this.
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Earl Marsden started developing a passion for music at the early age of twelve. He first learned to play the guitar at thirteen, and from there he pursued the study other instruments including the violin, piano and flute. Currently, he devotes some of his spare time to writing articles about music teaching while managing his own music studio.
