Wednesday, March 21, 2007

How to make a middle schooler miserable for 30 minutes

So, as you might have guessed, I just finished a lesson with a middle schooler and well.....I decided (a decision that was forced upon me) to make him miserable for his ENTIRE lesson time.

First a little background- this kid has been coming since school started in August and most of the time, he is a major spaz. He sits in the chair and rocks back and forth on the chair (lifting 2 legs off the ground at a time, then goes the other direction and lifts the other 2 legs). And sometimes he will be playing and all of a sudden he will just look and me and yell something. The kid is weird. One day I asked him if he took medication and he looked at me and said "no," and then I told him "maybe you should." My mom thinks that was mean, but oh well.

His dad is a retired army colonel so I can usually coax him into submission by threatening to tell his dad how he behaves in lessons. Well, today he came and told me that he hated his last teacher and then I asked him if that was his way of telling me that he liked taking lessons with me and he said "I never said I didn't hate you too." So by this point I was totally ticked at the kid and I told him that he better stop talking and start playing before I asked him not to come back for anymore lessons.

So, any of you music teachers out there (and anyone that has taken music lessons) can guess what we did for his whole half hour lesson. Major Scales. ALL OF THEM!!!! hahahahahah. Not only that, but I made him play each one twice. And I made him play the chromatic scale and every time he made a mistake, I made him start back at the beginning.

At the end he told me he was ready to leave and didn't want to play the last one, to which I said "you can either be quiet and play the last one, or we can both go out and talk to your dad." that did the trick. Then he told me that he actually likes coming to saxophone lessons because he has nothing else to do on Wednesday afternoons. And I told him if he doesn't like lessons, please do not come again.

I'm still thinking about calling the dad. hmmmmmmm

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