A common conversation with a student:
Me: "Did you get to work on that exercise/song/routine we talked about in our last lesson this week?"
Student: "So I was watching this YouTube video..."
I think the issue for private teachers today (when teaching adults, not children) is that they are not problem-solving oriented and often too easy on the students. They don’t offer much more than video-based teaching.
A good teacher sees weaknesses and essentially forces the student to work on the hard and boring stuff. When a student thinks they are good but they are not, the teacher works to fix the issue. That is not fun for anyone but that is what a good teacher will do. ( Some are better at communicating the issue to the individual student than others). If teachers are not moving students to eventually be excellent in each important area, the student might as well learn from Drumeo.
I think motivation comes from the student. The teacher can help create the motivation by clearly showing the problem, how to solve it, demonstrate what the results will be when the problem is solved and discuss how maintaining bad habits and techniques will hurt their future playing.
edit: I think most teachers are from the dark ages. IMO, every beginning drum kit student should have a double bass drum pedal and should train feet like they do hands. Make using feet as natural as using hands.
Ouch! There's a lot here that seems a bit unfair. But as a kid, I did have a pretty lame teacher at first. Other teachers were fantastic, though.
My lesson room has two (acoustic, not electronic) kits, and they both have double pedals. Just having the pedals there, I tend to teach double bass pretty often, since the students ask about it due to the pedals being present in the room. But the reason most
students don't own double pedals is that they're not that into metal, or they can't afford it, or their parents see it as frivolous. It's not the teachers.
When teaching adult students, one approach that has worked well is to have them play something they like, and rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. Then I'll play the same thing, and have them rate my performance. Finally, I'll ask them to articulate what exactly makes me playing it sound better. That usually opens to the door to some good discussion about what and how to practice. But I'm not telling the student what to play, what to like, or what their goal should be. It's 100% student-directed. And everyone knows that Drumeo can't teach like this, because a video cannot know in advance why the student struggles to play a piece, tailor a response.
Online videos do have value. I use them quite often, but only as a supplement to lessons I'm already teaching.
Improvement *is* fun. When a student has some success, they become more motivated to keep going. It's not an entertainment type of fun, like video games. It's maybe as much fun as, say, checkers. Accomplishments bring joy. I can't tell you how many times, when something finally clicks for a student, how their faces light up in a smile. It's fun, getting better at something.