Please demystify the "Sample lesson" situation

glassharmonica
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:09:50 +0000

An amusing story about the somewhat daunting quest for these trial lessons: my daughter had recommendations from her private teacher for several teachers at the conservatory which she now attends. Teacher A was one of her private teacher’s former teachers; he is a famous teacher, but was on the verge of retirement. He does not use email, and despite heroic sleuthing we never managed to nail down his phone number. My daughter wrote him a letter and send it to his postal box at the college in November 2009. Meanwhile, she contacted his son, a well-known teacher in his own right, who is on faculty at this conservatory, but not as a private teacher. She had a lesson with Teacher A’s son. They clicked quite well, and he offered to teach her at the other conservatory where he is full-time faculty, and to let her know his dad’s decision about retirement as soon as he found out. He called her the day before applications were due, and told her that his dad was formally retiring and would not have a studio the following year.

Meanwhile my daughter had a sample lesson with Teacher B. It was a good match-- she is now happily in his studio.

Fast forward exactly a year and a week: November 2010. My daughter was woken at 9 AM in her dorm room by a call from Teacher A, who had returned from abroad and collected his (probably very large) pile of mail from the conservatory mailbox. He read her letter, noting the date but not the year, and was calling back in what he naturally assumed to be a timely manner to talk to her about her application to the conservatory (where she was now fully immersed as a freshman.) It started out an extremely confusing conversation for both of them!

The point of this story is just to illustrate that if a teacher ignores your email or letter, it may have nothing to do with you or the teacher’s interest in teaching you. Sometimes communications are just plain difficult, even in this day and age. We also dealt with a teacher who only communicates by FAX and another one who did not receive our daughter’s or anyone’s email from the university web contact form for weeks because of a broken link (she called right away when she finally got the message-- and by then my daughter had given up on trying to contact her.)