How to Find a Guitar Teacher: Organization and Habits
Guitar teachers are organized to help you learn.
Many beginners to guitar want a teacher who is structured and ready to provide opinions about the best way to learn guitar. Teachers provide this advice in the form of a curriculum.
A curriculum could be described as the way in which a guitar teacher will go about helping you. It's a collection of habits, materials, and skills. Hopefully, each curriculum has been tested empirically with previous students.
The curriculum is exactly what makes a certain teacher worth his or her salt. It is in this regard that you can judge whether or not a teacher is one that you'd do well with: How a teacher teaches you, the curriculum the he or she follows, will directly affect your fun.
Understand that curriculums are organized to accomplish what the teacher deems important for you to learn. This implies that teachers are organized to teach what they want to teach, and not necessarily what you want to learn. How do find an awesome guitar teacher that teaches you what you exactly want to learn? Find a teacher who is organized to do just that.
Curriculums are organized for what exactly?
Curriculums make it easier for teachers to quickly come up with material that a student needs to work on in order to get better at playing guitar. The question is an important one: What exactly would you be learning if you took the teacher's word for it and unquestioningly followed everything he or she said to you?
You might be thinking that giving that sort of authority to someone else would make you nervous, and rightly so. If you don't question how and what the teacher teaches, you're not going to be happy. What you need to do is understand in the simplest terms what the teacher wishes to show you, and then you have to decide whether you want to stick with them.
Examples of curriculums, and how they can affect you
If a guitar teacher has been able to create a curriculum for learning how to read guitar music notation and feels as though it is vital to playing guitar, what do you make of this? If you're looking to play classical guitar, jazz guitar, or learn music theory you're in luck. This teacher is perfect for you. What if you simply want to play Beatles songs? This teacher is an awful choice. You'll be learning something inappropriate for what you ultimately want to do with guitar.
If a guitar teacher has a curriculum of teaching lead blues guitar and feels as though it is vital to playing and learning guitar, again, what do you make of this? If you're looking to play lead blues guitar, jazz guitar, or perhaps you want to learn how to improvise in general, this teacher is perfect for you. What if you think playing lead blues guitar is cheesy? Again, you'll be learning something inappropriate for what you ultimately want to do with guitar.
Find out what the teacher requires, and then decide
Finding out what a teacher is ready to teach you is easy: Ask the teacher what is non-negotiable for you to learn if you take lessons from him or her. It's going to help you, and it will help the teacher too. Win-win situation.
One other suggestion: don't ask a teacher to teach you something that they aren't totally willing to teach you. I know this might seem redundant, but just because a person can play guitar doesn't mean that he can teach it. Myself, I can play jazz guitar but I don't have a satisfying way to teach it. I can also play classical guitar, but I don't have a satisfying way to teach it. Instead, my specialty is how to help total beginners to guitar, and that's what I'm organized to do. Find teachers who are organized to teach you what you want to learn.