Tulsa Guitar Lessons | Unmotivated Students
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Sometimes students are unmotivated to practice as they are taking Tulsa guitar lessons. One of the reasons that students can be unmotivated to practice is not because they are unmotivated to learn the instrument or even that they disliked the instrument. A lot of times it’s just that they have a lot of other things going on or especially for kids. They simply would just rather be doing other things. Now currently in our climate at the United States, the most popular game right now is fortnight. So of course for guitar students, the majority of guitar students are boys and they would much rather be playing Fortnite than having their fingers hurting while playing the guitar. So a lot of times trying to motivate students to practice can certainly be a challenge. But here’s one thing to think about. If you are a student that isn’t that motivated to practice, one of the things that you can think about is the fact that even if you do not practice throughout the week, you are still getting 30 minutes of instruction every week.
At least. Some students take 45 minutes, some students take an hour and because you have this consistent weekly recurring lesson time, you will consistently get better and better regardless of whether or not you practice at home or not. And the truth is if you do practice, you will be learning at a much faster rate than you would without practicing. Everybody knows that, but if you take Tulsa guitar lessons, you will absolutely learn, even if you just come to your lessons. Now as a guitar instructor, if you recognize that your student is not practicing throughout the week, it is your duty to utilize every single second of that lesson. And if you know that this is the only 30 minutes that this student is going to have with their instrument in their hands this week, then you can not be lackadaisical about this lesson. Now, it is also very important to ensure that your student is enjoying the lesson. One of the reasons that students quit taking lessons is because they either aren’t interested or they’re not having fun and if they’re not practicing the guitar, that’s typically the first sign of a loss of interest. But that’s actually not always the case. There are students that are very interested, they just don’t have time to practice
and because of that they are committed, but they are just specifically valuing the lesson that they have at that given time. So you just have to be careful because you never know specifically why a student is not practicing. But you certainly do need to be
aware of certain warning signs of a student that potentially could be on the verge of quitting. So kind of have to balance that fun aspect of the lesson and the content aspect of the lesson and just kind of ensure that you’re having fun and they are absolutely progressing through that 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour long lesson. So that’s one of the things that you’re going to want to be careful of. Now if a student is showing signs of loss of interest, one thing that you can do, and this is something that we absolutely do very frequently, is asked this student what types of songs they are interested in, ask them what type of songs they listened to. And you may find not only that your student has a shared taste in music as yourself, which just again helps to connect with your student a little bit more. You may actually find that a song that they’re interested in learning and that they’re wanting to learn actually isn’t that far off from the level that they’re currently playing at. So if they’re interested in learning a song that’s on the radio, it may be a very easy song to learn. And so because of that, you could potentially immediately caused them to want to begin practicing at home simply because they’re now a song
that they’re interested in. And so if this is something that you can find out pretty early on what their John Rays of music that they like to listen to do, you can find that out. It will help to motivate your students to practice. And if you can’t find something that they’re interested in, well there’s only so much you can do, but that is certainly something that can help motivate your students to begin practicing. Again, another thing that you can do to help motivate your children and your students to practice is providing a change in content. So if you are taking Tulsa guitar lessons and you notice that all of your content is revolving around chords. So you’re playing G, C, E minor and D and you are just having a very difficult time going through and playing these chords. Or perhaps you’re just so good at the cords that it’s boring, but for whatever reason you are unmotivated to practice.
Well, one of the things that the guitar and structure can do is they can simply change the content of the lesson. So instead of practicing chords and strumming patterns, what they can do is perhaps just take a lesson to go ahead and teach the student about tabs. And if the student enjoys reading tabs, then you can continue to teach them tabs. And then once they understand how to read tablature, what you can do as a guitar instructor is you can provide the student with a melody through those guitar tabs. If the melody goes well, you could even expand all the way to a full fledged guitar solo, which would be really enjoyable for that student. And if that’s something that you need to do, just to kind of change the pace of that lesson, that could motivate a student that isn’t practicing. So trying something new is the best way to potentially get a student to change the way that they are learning an instrument.
Now there’s all sorts of different ways that you could help motivate a student, but when it really comes down to it, it certainly is the job of the student to get motivated and decide, I’m going to sit down and work at learning this instrument. As an instructor, you can only do so much before your heart starts to hurt because this student is unmotivated. It hurts even worse when it’s a student that you know has so much potential and they just aren’t able or willing to put in the work to get that lesson and the content practiced. So I hope that these things are, are ideas that can help you as an instructor to teach Tulsa guitar lessons. But those are my tips.