It took many many sample lessons before my son could ascertain who were the best teachers. Perhaps he was overwhelmed, but only comparing one or two teachers didn’t help him much. It was only when he was at auditions and did 6 lessons in 10 days did he get the aha moment of oh, so this is what a good teacher is. It was pretty cool to hear his enthusiasm. I also advocate doing small regional camps at the schools you are interested in because 1. They are cheaper. 2. You still can get a good experience because many of their students will be going to their camp. 3. You get to feel what it would be like to be a music student there. And did I say cheaper?lol. For those that do not qualify for any financial help, coming up with 4 to 6k for music camps is challenging so we had to get creative.
As others have said, taking a lesson with a teacher is the best way to see if your child connects with the teacher. My S got a lot of recommendations of teachers to look into from his own teacher at the time and also from some friends a year older who were also looking to study cello. We’re lucky to have a strong regional youth orchestra in our area so talking to other students and parents about where they were looking helped. We also found that when we were visiting a school for a lesson if we could also sit in on a studio class that gave us some additional information on the relationship that a Professor had with his students and the level of playing in his studio.
That is the million dollar question, and it is as hard to answer in some ways as it is to figure out who the good teachers are. Rankings like you see on websites and such don’t have much value IME, because they reflect only those who compile them, and may not reflect anything. Music students tend to network these days, and as a result they often will get to know about teachers from kids who have studied with them. Music festivals are another source, someone is associated with the festival, and you find that you click with them. Primary teachers usually will suggest people, and if you start looking at bios of working musicians, often you will see who they studied with. Working musicians are often good sources, because they are in the mix, they see a lot of musicians, and tend to see where the good ones are coming from.
All that is preliminary, from there as others have suggested it comes down to the student and how they interact with the teacher, and the way to find that out is sample lessons.Yes, people have chosen teachers basically without doing sample lessons and more than a few of them have done just fine, but teaching is very much a one to one relationship, and one size doesn’t fit all. If there is any way to do lessons with a potential teacher, do it, because it is a vital part of the process.
This is great conversation. We are anxiously awaiting to see if S gets into his first regional youth jazz orchestra - should hear this month, and I anticipated that the students and teachers at such a place would talk about their plans and preparations. It seems like S’ post-junior summer (or earlier if possible) would be a critical time to take sample lessons, but I would be surprised if we could get very much coverage and may still have to rely on some gambles.
It is probably impossible to get to see all or even a significant percent of teachers, and often when it falls back to a 2nd or third choice a kid may not have seen them before, so you are correct, sometimes it can come down to a gamble. Keep in mind that people often schedule sample lessons during auditions, or even after auditions in the time period between acceptances and then having to commit, so you don’t necessarily have to do it before audition time (though that is good because you can eliminate teachers, make the list smaller, by the time auditions happens). What I would suggest as a possible course is get a list of teachers, and from that list, cull out the top X, and try and get to see them for sample lessons and such, and keep the rest as reserves. it was a bit easier with my son, he applied to relatively few schools so the number of teachers involved was pretty small as well, and with a broader list it probably will be that you will see only a relatively few teachers at the top schools on his list.
Consider Mason Gross School of the Arts. Good school. Not everyone can get into a conservatory. The ivies like foreigners & legacies.
Harvard has approx. 10% international students and 12% legacies (who were otherwise qualified). Not sure about the other Ivies.
I confess that I read the lists. But I don’t pay much attention to a particular list on its own. What I mostly note are trends. I think it says something when a school like Oberlin is making most of the lists. To me, it says that the school looks good from all sorts of different perspectives and priorities. For a lot of kids and their families, maybe most, that’s probably a good thing. On the flip side, I’ve noticed that schools like Berklee and Juilliard are either at the top of a list or don’t make it at all. To me, that says it’s probably the absolutely right school for some kids, but maybe not so great for a large group of others.
Which sort of leads right back to the idea that the “fit” is more important than the rank. Having only started the process earlier this spring, I’m realizing that it’s less about researching schools and more about understanding my son. And I agree that visits are key. You start to understand how those school profiles on paper and websites translate in reality, and sometimes the experience is surprising.
We’ve been making it a point to try to have a private meeting with someone in the administration (department chair, dean, etc.) and/or a lesson with faculty on our visits and our experience has been that when this wasn’t possible, we come away with a “meh” feeling about the school. We recently made an out-of-town trip to visit schools and one of the schools on the list couldn’t be bothered to follow up an email and a phone call as they’d promised. I’m not inclined to entrust my 17 year-old and what will amount to a life’s savings to a school that can’t spend 5 minutes to schedule an appointment and send an email.
I’ll also confess that I’m nervous about the whole upcoming application/pre-screen/audition process and what it will do to my son’s senior year, which I was hoping would be a fun time for him. I’m trying my best to adopt a “we’re the customer and we’re doing the shopping” attitude, keeping in mind that sometimes the thing we want to buy doesn’t fit, or out of stock in our size, or too expensive. Still, we’re the ones in control.
Excellent point about fit.
@ScreenName48105 I would be wary of writing off a school just because of its administrators or admissions office. Once your child is enrolled that becomes an insignificant part of their experience - an experience which is mainly informed by their professors and their peers.
Great post @ScreenName48105 - It reminds me of shopping the American Eagle sale. Someone mentioned on another thread that a prominent institution still has space. A knowledgeable poster said that yes, they still need a mezzo or two. That is the equivalent of the khakis that are on sale but only if you are a 36/30 or 28/34 - they are out of 34/34s and if they existed they wouldn’t be giving you a deal.
It is also so true that not every good teacher will be good for your kid. A teacher can have a wonderful reputation and still not mesh with your kid, and I think it’s important to listen even if it runs counter to what you would want as a parent.
I agree with @spiritmanager about " not writing off a school just because of its administrators or admissions". When D was applying to grad school she was rebuffed by admissions when she asked to reschedule her audition due to a schedule conflict. She was ready to write off the school because of what was basically a “non response”. A few weeks later the faculty met with her on a Saturday. Not a regularly scheduled audition day but their “day off”. No help from admissions. Said plenty about the commitment from the faculty at the school and very little about admissions. Ultimately she got her MM there.
I would agree about not putting too much weight on administration or admissions, in a perfect world it would be great if admissions eagerly helped all with anything, did everything right, but the reality is that admissions can be a hectic place and often is staffed with work study students, so it may not reflect much on the school experience (I don’t know how it is today, but if you depended on going to NYU based on their administration being responsive, no one would go…
And yes, it is about fit, music instruction is not learning calculus, one size does not fit all for sure, it is more like apprentice and master,and it is very, very individualized. There are some ‘great teachers’ out there on violin I personally wouldn’t want my son or anyone else to study with, yet others would kill to work with them. Schools are a combination of things, compatibility with the teacher is huge, but if the teacher is great and the rest is pure misery, the kid may not do so well. There are always tradeoffs, and I think that teacher compatibility has to be the major concern, but if it is between a great teacher at a school where the student would otherwise be miserable (city kid in the country, country kid in the city, etc), and there is another school where the match with the teacher wasn’t quite as strong, but seemed to be good enough to move the kid forward, and the environment was more to their liking, that might be a better fit. On the other hand, going to the school that has the beautiful campus, nice practice rooms, a starbucks in the dorm, etc, etc, and the teacher is ‘nice’ might not be a great idea, either. It is also important to look at how the rankings were done, if it is something like USNWR and the like, I would immediately use the rankings as bird cage liner, if it was based on information filled out by music students and music professionals, I might give it a lot higher weight.
My attitude about the administration may seem unreasonable but I actually feel pretty strongly about it. Again, putting on that “customer” hat; for $35K per year, I expect more than a self-service checkout. My son’s in jazz studies, and the departments tend to be small with its own administration staff and chair who are perhaps more accessible. For us, the meetings have made a difference. We came away better understanding the department’s philosophies, what they feel their responsibilities are as jazz educators and what their expectations are of the students as well as the faculty. It may be that classical music education is more established/standardized, so that these points don’t need to be explicitly expressed by the school but, for jazz studies, it seems to vary a lot. One thing’s for certain, the meetings have made a much bigger impact on my son’s opinion about the school than the tours, facilities, campus, etc.
And I’m happy to report that despite my crazy parent demands, of the six schools we’ve visited, he really liked three of them, including three teachers that he’d love to study with.
I understand fully the “customer” angle. It is A LOT of money. Just know that the admissions folk who are “front end” personnel will have very little, if anything at all, to do with your students overall education and graduation. But you might consider that you are spending it on four years of education not the brief (though frequently lame) interactions with clerks and not faculty. (though really top and busy music faculty can be the WORST at returning emails 8-| ) The example of my D’s experience continued well past graduation. Not only did she get a first class education at a top school in her field— virtually every music related job she got after school was through faculty recommendations and direction. She would have never known that based on her early contacts with admissions administration but she did understand after the faculty made the initial commitment that Saturday morning
As someone whose business revolves around customer service, this was a hard pill for me to swallow…but it was certainly easier since the same faculty gave D enough financial support to get her through grad school financially independent. (no funds from yours truly) So ultimately, we were both happy “customers”. And it was all on sale ;))
How does one find gem teachers? Legwork, research, websites like this, talking to other parents and some creative thinking. We found out that there was a seminar being given in NYC based around a certain viola teacher’s methods and low and behold several of the viola teachers we had been hearing about were participating, so we went to the seminar. It cost, but nothing like traveling to six different states to take lessons with the teachers. My daughter was able to do masterclasses with a bunch of teachers on our list all in one week and we eliminated most of them. The seminar was not really for high school kids and certainly was not for the purpose of auditioning teachers, but it worked that way for us. To find the gems you have to do a little digging. ,
Certainly a lot of it is word of mouth. I don’t know how we would have heard of the professor at the school we decided on other than that S worked with one of his recent students at a workshop. After she described her former teacher to S he was very interested, as well as being impressed by her playing. Then S did his digging around for information and also found out that his current teacher knows the professor very well.
We found having an open mind to be the best way to find one of those great teachers. Our private teacher was so set on what school and which teacher to study with that nowhere else was seriously discussed. I refused to accept that and we set off in search of other teachers as well. Even though we did eventually end up with both the school and the teacher that her private teacher was set on ( she was right ) the journey was invaluable. The more connections you make and the more other teachers get to hear you the better off you will be later. A couple of the teachers we found along the way have become valuable resources since and the journey was money and time well spent.
@ jb1966-
Nicely put, it really is a classic case of the journey being as valuable as the end result. While teacher recommendations are valuable places to start, a teacher your private teacher is set on, or the school, may not be the best one for the student, music teachers have their own biases (in my S’s case, his teacher in high school recommended some teachers, that when my son saw them, realized they were just like his his school teacher, specifically the negative things he was looking not to repeat, another one she recommended ended up being his teacher, who he loves). And you never know, that teacher you saw and loved might be a lifeboat if the teacher you decided upon turns out not to work, or could end up being who you study with in grad school. One of the biggest lessons I learned with this whole journey is that it is a continuous path of discovery, kind of like peeling an onion (and sometimes just as eye watering lol), and that anything you do to increase your knowledge, or explore things, ends up giving a more clear picture of a somewhat nebulous process.