Guitar Teaching

Guitar Teaching 

As another CAS activity I have been teaching guitar to two of my friends for service. I have certain ambitions for them, for example I wanted them to learn some lead guitar as well as rythm. However they pick it up quite quickly. 

Objectives

My first objective was to teach them 4 chords of the song "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", and with that a strum pattern. This is coming along nicely, they have learnt the chords quickly, however it is obviously very hard to learn the changes as well as the strumming pattern. 

My second objective was to teach them a rhythm part. So for the first rhythm part I have chosen to teach them the famous "Smoke on the Water" riff, which they both picked up very fast and for their next rythm I searching for something more intermediate, like "Sweet Child of Mine". 

Learning Outcomes 

I think that I have reached the learning outcomes 1,3 and 8. I have been able to see my weaknesses and strengths, for example I saw that I was week at beeing able to show my student in a useful way how to play the different pieces. As well as working collaboratively with my two other students, as I had to motivate them to learn these things and to play on. I also learnt new teaching skills, which I could use later, as I had to learn patience as well as perseverance, as I had to try different things out from time to time, so that my students could learn.

Reflection

After teaching for several months I had learnt a great deal of things. I came into this activity having quite unrealistic expectations, that I would teach some students to play guitar to a standard of mine in a few months, that my teaching skills would be outstanding and that it would be fairly straight forward. However the reality of which was quite different. The first few lessons on basics, like figner positioning, chords, lead playing were straight forward as I had expected. However this was not yet on stuff like rythm playing and the sychronisation you needed with both hands. When we got on to the song of boulevard of Broken Dreams, that is fairly straight forward for me, I had not realised the difficulties I would have faced as a teacher. My students struggled with changing between chords and getting the rythm correct, so as a teacher it was my responsibility to correct this so that they could learn it with ease, however I found it difficult to find ways of simplifying this rythm because I play it however I feel the song. So I sat down and thought about ways of teaching it, so that it would come across easier to them, this brought me back to the days where I started playing guitar and the lessons I had with my guitar teacher. I thought how he explained it to me and it occured to me that he explained it in terms of ups and downs. He used to use a saying that went like, "one, two, buckle my shoe." When I reminded myself of this I thought it was a brilliantly simple and easy way to explain it and teach rythm. So I explained to them that the rythm would be down, down, down, up, down, down. However then gave them the saying of " one, two, buckle my shoe" this helped them a lot I think and really made them start playing more fluently than before, however the changing chords was still difficult, however I knew this from when I started, however after practicing enough it just clicks sometime, and you have the muscle memory in your fingers to know where they should be, this is when you notice how clever your body actually is. This whole activity helped me in terms of service, as I was delivering a service to two people who were learning a skill in the process, however it helped me in learning the way of conveying information to other people and seeing them progress. This is when I understood what people talk about when they talk about teaching satisfaction. In addition, this made me think about future career options and to think about teaching, which helped me in a sense. This was really a good feeling to see my students progress, although my students never really learnt how to play the full song due to lack of practice, they learnt the basics of chords and rythm and now can pick this up again whenever they want to.