My Opinion on Music Teachers
(My only experience thus far on this subject is for piano teachers so I’m not too sure if this applies for other instruments or band instructors)
Over the years I’ve had a grand total of 6 piano teachers, ranging from beginner to advanced, inexperienced to over qualified, and organized to a complete wreck. I feel I’ve had enough experience with them to give a good definition of what exactly makes up a good teacher.
It’s clear that pretty much every teacher is different from one another. They all have different styles, focus on different aspects of music, and each themselves learned in a different way. Now when it comes to a “good” teacher it would be unreasonable to say that a jazz teacher is worse than a classical teacher because of the techniques involved (even then i think that point should be reversed), but the two can be compared very well, same with any other teacher, by one single aspect. How well they can gauge where a student is.
No matter how much finger technique you can teach a student, they still need a strong base for the understanding of the instrument, on the contrary if you focus entirely on aspects of the instrument and ignore finger technique then they will struggle actually playing later on. I’ve only recently met the only teacher I’ve ever found that effectively balances these two traits, however 1/6 isn’t a great batting average.
Whether a teacher is aimed at teaching the experienced or the beginner they should understand where to gauge their students and know not just what to teach them, but how to teach them that they WANT to learn.