Reflection on Lesson

For a class assignment I had to teach the first five minutes of a beginning trumpet lesson to an imaginary fifth grader.  No problem, except that "imaginary" fifth grader was my course instructor.  Not having any background in brass made me very nervous about teaching the lesson, but I spoke to the band teacher at the elementary school where I was substitute teaching in general music.  He gave me his methods for starting a student off on the trumpet, which focused on getting a sound out of the mouthpiece.  "Great," I thought.  That would take up more than five minutes. I looked at a few youtube videos made  by music teachers on how to teach beginning trumpet.  I toyed with the idea of buying my own mouthpiece to demonstrate, but decided against it.  "Not necessary," I thought. Then I realized that buzzing made my ears ring and itch, and it felt very uncomfortable.  I doubted I could go through with the lesson.

My turn would be the second to last person out of about 16 students, so I earnestly took notes on the teaching methods of my classmates as each took his/her turn.  Most of the focused on a lot of terms, such as the parts of their instruments, either flute, clarinet, trombone, or trumpet.  For the most part, I noticed that the major drawback of that approach was that five minutes ran out before the "fifth grader" was able to make a sound out of his instrument.  I felt better about deciding to go straight to the mouthpiece to produce a "buzz."  I was thrown a curve when my "fifth grader"  had never played Hot Cross Buns before! (I wanted him to buzz the song with his mouthpiece.)  I had been teaching elementary recorder and generally assumed that all fifth graders had played recorder and would have learned the song already.  So that was a good lesson for me - never assume any pre-knowledge for a beginning student.  Five minutes went quickly, thankfully, and I did learn a lot about teaching beginning band instruments.  Less talking, more demonstrating, focus on one or two necessary procedures, and repeat, repeat, repeat.  Less is definitely more.