Teaching guitar on the year of the plague
Last day of 2020. And what a year this has been. I’ve learnt a few things about what I do.
I’ve managed to keep a modicum of private teaching going, all of it via Zoom & al. I’ve done perhaps three or four face-to-face lessons since March when this whole thing started. It’s been very complicated at the two schools I teach, one of them in particular where the situation seemed to be getting out of control and I felt decidedly not safe.
OTOH, I’ve come to realise that I could do this guitar teaching thing anywhere in the world, provided there is good internet. I’m currently preparing several pupils for ABRSM and Trinity grade exams, teaching a six year old (I don’t usually take them so young but he’s making good progress and enormously enthusiastic) and have a couple of pupils in remote parts of the world. The only complication with the latter is the having to sort out convenient times when you are eight hours’ away. I can do this work purely online, it doesn’t have to be from a tiny flat in one of the most expensive cities in the world, the attractions of which are all denied us in a time like this.
This is perhaps a little digression in what was meant to be a blog about the more technical sides of guitar teaching -and about details of guitar technique, but is a necessary reflection on these strange times. Contrary to what I might have anticipated when this whole situation started, I haven’t floundered and I’m still here, teaching people, trying to help people reach their potential in this small area of human endeavour, the making music on the guitar.
This guitar teaching thing 
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