[TPIN] More than one teacher at a school.... New thread

[Michael Anderson]

I generally agree with what David has written here. However, sometimes there
are exceptions to this.. I know of a couple of schools who have two teachers
where one excels at the technical side of teaching and fundamental skills
and the other excels at coaching literature. Students who need fundamental
work will take from one guy their first two years and then move to the other
guy.

Also, at U. of Illinois, Mike Ewald and Ronald Romm have a unique "Open
Studio" policy where students can sign up to take lessons with either.
Younger students also take private and group lessons with graduate
assistants there and they have a mass group warm up session every morning at
7:30. Mike and Ron make this work fabulously. I visited them and observed
their teaching when I was on sabbatical 4 years ago and the next year taught
in this system for a week when Ron was out due to health reasons. During
this time Mike brought in several people to teach for a week. I had a blast.

I hope Ron will see this thread and post some comments about how this works
for them. This is a very unique situation though and I bet it would be
difficult to recreate with different people at a different school.

I also hope Al Lilly will post on this subject because he was one of the few
who went to IU and studied both with Gorham and Adam. I don't know how it is
at IU now, but in those days I understand there was usually a good deal of
animosity between the students of those two studios.

Great subject Jon. I'm looking forward to hearing from people on this one.
I'd actually LOVE to have another trumpet teacher at my school.

MA


> From: David Arndt <darndt at oriongate.net>
> Organization: Orion Development Corporation
> Reply-To: <darndt at oriongate.net>
> Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:56:24 -0400
> To: 'Jon Lewis' <just4tpin at yahoo.com>, <tpin at tpin.okcu.edu>
> Subject: RE: [TPIN] More than one teacher at a school.... New thread
> 
> Don't teach college *now*, but I did teach in the conservatory division at
> UARTS years ago, in addition to teaching high school.  (Jumped tracks into
> software to make some money back in the 80's).
> 
> My belief is that it's not productive to study with two different teachers
> at the same time, unless their purpose is to teach you different things
> (i.e., one for technique/playing the horn, another for jazz
> theory/improvisation, etc.).
> 
> I also believe that a student needs to stay with a teacher for a length of
> time to get the benefit of what that teacher has to offer.  BUT... That
> being said, I think it's also detrimental for a student - especially one
> that is motivated - to stay with the same teacher for more than 3, 4 years
> tops.  Young, ambitious trumpet students, in particular, need the benefit of
> different perspectives, so they can get their many questions addressed as
> early in their career as possible.
> 
> I studied with the same (very gifted) teacher in high school and college.
> But it would have been to my benefit to break out of the mold and get some
> different perspective mid-way.
> 
> Just my 2 cents.
>