Jerk teacher but knows his stuff ($31USD) vs startup nice & encouraging teacher ($25USD)?

Which would you choose? I paid for both of them for a month to compare their teaching style. They live the closest to where I live. Had the second class for both of them.

For the jerk teacher, he talks down on you, attempts to sells you extra & expensive accessories, but he teaches the foundation: how to hold the bow, how to sandwich onto the chin rest & gave me practices to hold the bow and the violin. He is leaving me with with a feeling of not wanting to learn violin. He's younger than I am, and made a lot of assumption about adults, and pretty much said I'm "still immature" when we it was all him talking the whole class.


The nice teacher is encouraging, but never instruct me how to hold a bow or exactly how to sandwich the violin with my chin. We basically went immediately to Suzuki Method after I adjusted my shoulder to a comfortable level. I felt like I missed some important steps. We have fun.

If the nice teacher can prove to me she's capable of teaching, I will choose her immediately because she doesn't attempt to destroy my interest in violin.

What should I do?

There is no reason for a teacher to talk down to a student. Playing should be fun. Also, if in your first lessons a teacher is trying to sell you other products that is a big red flag.

Talk to the teacher you like. Tell her you like her but you feel there is something missing in the instruction regarding bowing et. al. Tell her you like her approach but you need a little more assertiveness.

I sometime shave students who want to learn certain things. So, I schedule the lesson to be 75% of what I think is important and 25% of whatevetr they want. You can do the sam with her. If she assignes x, y, and z; tell her you also want to work on bowing this week. It shoudl work out wonderfully.

Thanks for your response.

I currently live in Asia, so this jerk teacher is using a local way to teach someone who have been educated in Canada to play violin. I haven't been educated here in Asia before so his authoritarian method really triggers a bad emotion in me.

My current train of thought is to not continue with the nice teacher. I felt if she's missing something so foundational, I can see how many more techniques I will also miss along the way. I can see her current fault mainly because it's basic, I've seen every violinist on the net begin their lesson by telling you how to hold the bow and how to position the chin rest. But further along the course, I will not be able to identify what I'll miss!

Furthermore, I've seen the guy teacher play the violin, and he does play it well. I haven't seen the girl play the violin aside from doing some tuning-up notes. I don't have confident that following her would make me a good violinist. Instead, if I put up with the guy teacher's attitude, I have more potential to become a good violinist and develop my own approach to teach my student if I happen to become a teacher in a few years.

Perhaps I should just fire them both and get myself someone who is nice and competent - that would be ideal. But I'm just dreaming because to have someone like that would require me to pay at least $$45-$50USD here, which I really couldn't afford.

sigh... sucks.

Here’s the question that you should be asking yourself. What’s your outcome? What do you really want out of the violin? Think of the teacher’s goals. The jerk teacher’s outcome is to really be brutally honest and hold nothing back. The other teacher is friendly, but you know deep down that you’re not improving at your best. For me, I would stick with the mean teacher and simply be brutally honest with him when he tries to sell me stuff. It would create rapport and I’m sure if he’s brutally honest that he respects others who are brutally honest as well. More importantly, what are you violin goals and you want to achieve 1 to 5 years from now? Who can get you there faster? If you stayed with the fun teacher, would you really enjoy the process after 5 years of mediocre improvement? It all depends on what you want. Hope my input and questions helps you decide which is best for you.

It's his inability to distinguish between individuals well enough that it's almost offensive when he does speak how he puts people in boxes. My background is completely different from the rest of his students, so I don't think he should assume. But he does play violin well, so I did end up choosing him over the girl. I see how the girl was trying to manipulate me into continuing with her (flirting), so it was a no brainer to not choose her. When I asked her to play some more complicated music in my 3rd lesson, she was completely incapable. I'm just surprised someone like that think she's capable of teaching. Somebody like that should be negatively reinforced, so I called her and told her how the guy violin teacher is better.

My motivation to learn violin is really driven by having listened to violin music and liked the sound of the instrument over the rest.