I have to make them very aware of what’s going on so that I can give them an instruction to do, if that makes sense. It just makes my life so much easier because if I’m there physically fixing their mistakes and then they’re like “how do I do that at home without you doing that for me”. I actually noticed that my students started, after the initial trial period, improving way faster than ever, because they were successful in the lesson so they are successful at home and knew exactly how to practice it. Now all my students (this includes my in-person students) I don’t touch them for anything. The way I demonstrated everything was with very specific words and demonstrations and I followed up with videos through Whats App. I taught all my students to tune their violins with a tuner and then eventually with the fifths. I learnt to be really specific with my words. I actually did some trial lessons when I went to the Aspen music festival in America for two months and what I realised was that my students weren’t independent I couldn’t tune them or go fix something. What was that period like as you transitioned from in-person lessons to Skype lessons when you moved overseas?It was a huge learning curve. I have a new 6yr old student doing so well! For five years I’ve had no one reply back and actually two weeks ago I’ve had three enquiries and two have succeeded, so that’s exciting.
Generally I don’t get people replying back. It’s kind of difficult telling new people “go to my house but I’ll be there on a screen”. If I need to do something then everything is there, so they still get the feeling that they’re going to someone’s house but I’m just popping up on a screen. There’s an office that my mum has set up for me and there’s two computers and then all my materials I use are there and I have scanned copies of absolutely everything. The skype lessons still take place in my parents house and that’s great to teach when I go back as well.
When I come back we generally do intensive lessons, so anything I want to touch on we’ll do it then. I’ve only got two students left that I started with in person, because everyone else has gone off to university. So how long have you been doing the face-to-face teaching? Today we caught up with Amelia via Skype to talk about how she transitioned her Tauranga-based students from in person music lessons to Skype Lessons. Amelia Taylor moved from Tauranga to the USA but found her students didn’t want to change teachers.
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