I hear you bro...you are dead on with all of this
Just to be clear, I hear you too!
.....you know how many times I have given the same lesson 3,4,5 weeks in a row because as soon as the student leaves, their books and sticks stay in the car until the next drum lesson?
why would a parent want to pay for that ?
.......just pay a sitter
Ha! I had an adult student who did that. It wasn't even his parents money, it was his! Seriously, I felt like he only came to lessons to have some social interaction once a week outside of his day job.
I for one refuse to take on a student who has no intention of putting in work.
that way the parents are not paying for a baby sitter and I dont have to deal with nonsense
if they choose to go pay someone else to baby sit then more power to them and I don't have to hold anyones hand .
Well my friend you're lucky to have built up that kind of roster you can do that. I don't suspect you turned down that many when you first started teaching did you?
When I was teaching, I didn't have that roster to be able to say no.
And then when I moved back to Los Angeles, I was surrounded by so many drum teachers, it became obvious I'd have to pick up the scraps to get established. And that's when I realized, I really don't like teaching that much.
On the flip side of all of this, my buddy (who occasionally posts here) was talking about he took a 6 year old who had mild down syndrome. He said the first three weeks of lessons, the kid just sat there and cried. But now, 6 months later, he has this kid playing songs. Incredible dedication on the teachers part to endure that. Incredible to be able to work through that. But certainly not possible if the only goal was to have super serious students who are dedicated to becoming working pros.
I just had the strangest flashback. I was thinking that my parents' generation said almost exactly the same things - same words at times, even - about my generation back in the 70s.
Spoiled. Expect everything on a platter. Lazy. Not prepared to work. Fishing for compliments and expecting praise for mediocrity. Pretty well the same.
I suspect your are correct.
"Kids are different today, I hear every mother say" was a line from a song, in 1966.
As parents, we want our kids to have things better than we had it. And then, we get surprised our kids don't appreciate that they have it better. When the fact is, they didn't live through whatever we did, and don't know have any basis to know they have it better. Which we then perceive as laziness, or being a spoiled brat.
Any child psychology book show that natural tendency of a child to push limits as far as they can to see where the limits are. Which can drive the rest of us nuts because we have already discovered where the limits are.
Which begs the question, has there really been a steady decline in the western work ethic and character since WWII?
On some levels perhaps, but overall, no. If that were 100% true, technology wouldn't advance. But rather, we see technology jumping by leaps and bounds. If we were truly declining, I'd suspect we'd riding horse and buggies instead of posting online.