Well, everyone keeps talking about "transfer wrecks". Just wondering what these poor students do to make them such dreadful players. I mean how would you describe a TW's playing as opposed to a non-TW's playing. And what do you do to turn things around?

It has to do with skills, not playing. I'm a recovering TW twice over, and with piano, the teacher I transferred from is mostly myself when I was a child. I could dash off some music quite readily. Mostly I had sonatinas at my disposal as a child, mostly Clementi, so Alberti bass is second nature. I developed the "round hand", fingers poking from it at the notes which creates tension, arms motionless so you could balance a penny on the wrist. If you understand piano technique, you'll see how this will be limiting, uncomfortable and create other problems.

A "transfer wreck" who was taught a few pieces really well by rote, in order to showcase the teacher in recitals or exams, might play these pieces quite brilliantly. But may not be able to find middle C, interpret music on his own in any capacity, recognize the key signature.

I'll let the teachers answer after this. It has to do with skill development, I would think.

TW: Doesn't know lines and spaces in either clef or does not know them in the bass clef.

Only reads with finger numbers.

No idea how to count.

Start with that.

Most of these wrecks get to me fairly early in their playing, so it's not hard to turn things around. But the longer it goes on, the worse.

I have a little girl who took lessons for more than two years. She did not know the names of keys. She could not find a single line or space.

She can now find any line or space, up to 5 leger lines above or below either clef. Knows chords in several keys, can name all the letters in chords, scales. Know several scales. Reads well. Counts properly.

You guys reading here think we are exaggerating when we talk about horrendous teaching.

If the average students who come to me read English as badly as they read music, none of them could read a simple sentence.

It's really bad.

I'd wager that any teacher writing in this forum is an absolute genius teacher compared to other people in this area teaching.

I've written at length in the past, but I'll echo some sentiments here:

These wrecks are wrecks for many reasons. Sometimes the problem is the parents! Most parents know next to nothing about piano, and their expectations are unreasonable and/or laughable. They tend to think extremely highly of their kids, and if their kids don't progress as well as their neighbors' kids, they think that the teacher is at fault when in fact it's their kids who have ZERO aptitude for piano and/or ZERO desire to learn. Some of these parents can't be bothered to help at home to monitor practice. Some of these parents think of piano as a 9-month-a-year activity and take long breaks. Some parents treat piano as a recreation so they don't put much emphasis in learning.

After that, you got the kids. Lazy kids. Over-scheduled kids. Kids who rather play video games or spend hours on their phones. Kids who really should be learning sports instead of piano. Kids who don't want to learn piano. Kids who think piano is not "cool." etc. etc. etc. And there are kids who have this unbelievably bad attitude toward learning anything.

Very seldom do you have great parents and great kids, and then somehow they get matched with a lousy teacher. Talk about a triple bogey. For obvious reasons, bad teachers make Transfer Wrecks.

But those students are not really "transfer" wrecks, they're just typical of the majority of parents and children. They both just need a little training. But it's not as though a previous teacher taught them bad habits, just didn't teach them how to work. Or didn't teach them long enough so that they got into the habit of working well at the piano. It took my son 7 years at least to develop good (and independent) study habits, and that's with being reminded, every day, how and what to do by teachers and parents.

I am thinking that "transfer wrecks" have ingrained motion habits that are difficult to correct and cause injury and hinder good playing. Reading by finger number rather than by note, or looking at hands instead of the score before they've truly memorized a piece, could also be considered as having been taught badly. Or it could be that they just need a little more time to develop good habits - not they've necessarily assimilated bad habits.

Actually, that *does* make them transfer wrecks, since that term was coined by AZNpiano himself. Doesn't mean he doesn't work with them or try, but you really can't make someone want to play piano. If they want to, they will do it.

Another aspect of transfer wrecks is a lack of interest in improving the sound of a piece. They will play it once. You tell them there's something you can help them with, say the pedalling. They flip the page to show you the next piece.

They may also be glib about errors, just motoring on. You say, let's look at those notes, and find out what they are. They start at the beginning again. You have to stop them and bring them to the difficult area again.

A large part of the difficulty is that the other teacher never stopped them or got their full attention.

Also, I don't use more words than I have to, but some students can barely listen to instructions. They start playing something again before you've even finished your point.

There's all sort of problems with transfer wrecks. Another one is they think they play amazingly when in fact, they've only gotten good at reading notes and typing them on the piano. Their ambition to play high level pieces may be completely ridiculous, because they can't even play Twinkle Twinkle with a modicum of shaping.

To turn them around is a very long process. I'd say it can take three to five years to undo the damage in some cases.

And many parents would have given up after 7 weeks.

My last post was merely to point out the fact that Transfer Wrecks are awful for many reasons. They say there's this parent-teacher-student triangle. All three parties are responsible. Imagine a great teacher/student pair. Both hardworking and mindful of what they are doing. But when you mix that with a lackadaisical parent who always brings the kid late and refuses to upgrade the instrument (or even buy books!), and then decide to take a 3-month vacation every year, the kid still won't advance very far.

I'm afraid that I share pianopi's confusion

This describes attitudes of parents, and attitudes of students. I agree that either set of attributes or both will make for a miserable experience, and make teaching close to impossible. But the term is transfer wreck -- not wreck wreck. The word "transfer" means that the student was transferred from another teacher. How do the things you described correlate to the fact of transferring from another teacher, or having had another teacher first? What I seem to be seeing is types of parents and students that make for difficult teaching. I'm not seeing the "transfer" part.

I have the same confusion.

First of all, TWs are all ages. They may have had 3 months of bad teaching, or a decade.

By the time I got to college I was a transfer wreck. I was so damaged by horrible teaching that it's a miracle I got straightened out.

There was nothing wrong with my parents, and there was nothing wrong with me.

Just a REALLY bad teacher.

In the same way I get students who have had horrendous teaching.

This is totally separate from non-supportive parents and students who will do no work and will not listen.

Thick-headed parents and students who will not listen have no part in this discussion. Those things should be for separate topics.

I've never met a truly awful music teacher, either working privately or for a school. My kids have had teachers they didn't get along with, for one reason or another, and whom I would not have wanted to retain; but I think that's slightly different.

So I'm wondering, just out of a sense of curiosity, what it is that the teachers of these "transfer wrecks" do, or don't do, that is so dreadful?

Can the next teacher always tell though whether the problem was the student (not listening) or the teacher was bad?

I think the source of the problem becomes very clear after a few weeks of working with the student. Keen students who have had bad teaching tend to be interested in improving and say things like "no one ever told me that!". You notice a surge in their progress once they have started to integrate the new ideas.

A little anecdote: A few years ago two sisters transferred to my studio; they about 3 yrs apart in age and had studied with two other teachers. According to the mother, they had both started with a "young and fun" teacher that they really loved but who moved away. The second teacher was "old and strict", and apparently said mean things to older sister. Both sisters enjoyed piano and the parents made sure that they practiced. However, it became obvious that the older sister had big gaps in her knowledge, mostly due to the time she spent with "young and fun" teacher. The younger sister, having spend more of her piano playing career with "old and strict" teacher, had fewer issues. I could tell from the notes written in the books that the second teacher had been trying to fill in the gaps, but the result was that the older sister felt stupid and lost confidence. So you can see that the first teacher was deemed successful because of her rapport with the girls, even though she was creating what we would call transfer wrecks. The second teacher had the unenviable task of correcting the errors. I also had to do some work rebuilding the girls' confidence as well as continuing to solidify fundamentals.

1. Can't read notes.
2. Don't know how to count or work out rhythms.
3. Pedal totally wrong.
4. Start playing and practicing from the beginning and return there after every mistake.
5. Don't know finger numbers, often finger numbers are backwards for the LH.

Any of the above, and often all of the above. And that's just off the top of my head.

Not at the first lesson.

Example: Little girl comes to me with her mother. Can't read notes, can't count, doesn't know the names of keys, can't play anything without finger numbers, does not really understand finger numbers. Scared of last teacher, and mother is scared of last teacher. Two years of lessons.

I just knew I had to start from scratch. I was prepared for a really slow student, possibly with a mother who would not cooperate and who was not help at home.

By the end of a month I knew it was the last teacher.

You know when you get cooperation and the student(s) is/are learning things at a normal rate.

Then it is obvious.

+1

Excellent...

Ok, so now we've sorted out the "transfer" part of the question, what about the "wreck"?

I hate to stick my oar in (well..maybe..), but a student who can't read notes, doesn't know fingering on the LH (which is understandable because you read from left to right so therefore the pinky seems to be finger 1 ..), starts from the beginning after every mistake etc. doesn't sound like much of a wreck (which describes something like Humpty Dumpty after the fall), but more like a train that has yet to leave the station. Again, aren't these, to a great extent, still developmental issues? And it is difficult to instill and cement these things in children without the threat of tests and grades (a lot of music teachers I have met in the US don't go the exam route). Still, back to the point: these students are not exactly "wrecked', are they?

My Frankenstein's monster aspects are arms so stiff they've given up on hunting that elusive "relaxed wrist", a foot clamped to the pedal at all times, a terror of lifting my hands too far off the keys, and a great stupidity in finding phrases. A little more difficult to fix in a seamless way that learning which note is which.

Sometimes I have frightening thoughts about what other teachers think when they get my students as transfers!

Like all of you, I have students with varying levels of motivation and habits. And some parents who are wonderful, some who are disengaged and some who get in the way.

Our motivated students with good habits and wonderful parents will progress well and play well, but a lot of what they're doing is stuff we cannot take credit for.

Our unmotivated students with poor habits and less-than-helpful parents will progress slowly or not at all, and may not be able to recall basic things we have taught them over and over in dozens of lessons. But a lot of what they're failing to do is stuff we cannot take the blame for.

The best picture of our teaching is the student who likes piano but doesn't make it a priority, practices as often as we ask but not more, and has parents who make sure they practice but aren't much involved beyond that. Those are the students who most clearly show what we do as teachers.

When you get a transfer, you have no idea whether the transfer was one of those mid-range students or not, so it's not a good idea to evaluate the teacher based on transfers -- unless you do know enough about the teacher and the range of students to draw that conclusion.

My teacher taught me piano technique basically from scratch because she said I would never be able to play advanced material well playing the way I did. I did not play the piece I demonstrated wrong, just inefficiently and with a poor tone. I also knew how to practice with different methods as opposed to just playing through. So I think there are different levels of "wreck", some easier to salvage than others...I am pretty certain my teacher thought in the beginning It would be easier and faster than it was...

I think Heather puts it very fairly. It is very easy to judge others and put them down, especially when they live only in your imagination (I presume piano teachers don't always meet their students' previous teachers).

As an art teacher, my first instinct is very often to be arrogant about my own methods, and tend, childishly, to look down on other teachers' ways of teaching. It is a self-preservation instinct. One thinks that if only I could have the other teachers' students in my class, I would teach them the way out of their bad habits. But it's just not true. Honestly, if I look at my own students' work, it is very much on a par with many other teachers' students I've come across.

Students do run the range of abilities and motivational skills, and then there's the amount of time it takes a person to really assimilate a new skill. It's not always just the teacher's fault a student isn't quite model.

Often, with my art students, after tackling the problem of just mixing the paint, then moving on to trying to put the stuff on the canvas, then trying to make it do the thing they want it to, two hours have passed and parents are marching to the door to see the works of genius. Everyone's paintings are looking slightly worse than they did at the start of the lesson, and parents wonder if I know what I'm doing, and what they're paying for. (And the other art teachers are feeling smug because their students' paintings are at the tail end of two weeks' work, and look like they're supposed to.)

Ideally, parents should take some art and piano lessons with their children just to know how hard it is, and just what's involved, so they can help them effectively at home.