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With all the talk about good teachers and such, I have to pose this question: What's the worst thing you (yes YOU) ever did as a teacher??
Mine was about 3 years ago; I will post it after I get a few colorful responses.

Hmmmm.... did some pretty wild stuff as a drill instructor back in the 60's

Oh... are you talking about music sorry.

I once played my horn for a first grade class. A very cute girl in the back row got a big grin on her face, and her hand shot up in the air. "Oooh, oooh, oooh!", she said. So I called on her. Her response? "My brother had a frog and it died!".

When I was an undergrad. I had a trumpet student. I was showing him how to use my Voldyne to check his lung capacity. I was also sick so after demonstrating I sprayed a very healthy amount of disenfectant into the tube. We talked for another minute or so and I (wrongly) assumed the stuff had all evaporated. It had coagulated in the coils and was still there. I told him to take a gaint breath and he did and he proceeded to turn a shade of purple I did not see again until the "gas chamber" part of basic training.

I once told a young student who had been attempting for about 4 years to learn the euphonium to swich to clarinet.

I struggled with the decision to tell him but he had such a severe overbite that playing the euph was next to impossible.

Still feel bad about makin him swich from euph because he liked it, but he started sounding good on the bass clarinet in the matter of a few months.

Oh well
Jim

This isnt from me, but a sax player friend of mine...


Was teaching his sax lesson, and rather tired... So, in "resting his eyes," he dozed off...


He awoke about 30 minutes later. The student had left. Best part is, the check was sitting on the music stand--he was paid to sleep!!

I made fun of my teaching partner's baldness, and then noticed that at least two-thirds of the class was bald. Sigh. Always know your audience!

Okay, not relevant to teaching music to kids, but you didn't narrow it down that much.

Rick "who teaches engineering courses regularly" Denney

While on tour with the American Wind Symphony Orchestra we would stop in towns and give lessons to the local students. One Jr. High student I believe it was had a brand new 3 valve upright tuba the school had just purchased for him to use. I commented that I thought they wasted their money on a rather expensive brand of 3 valved tuba and could have picked up a much nicer instrument for nearly the same price.

I later found out that he had started crying about it shortly afterwards. From them on I was teased for making poor defenseless children cry in the towns we stopped in.

I've been told that I should write a book of all of my teaching experiences, funny, good and some not so good. How about the time I brought 4 buses of junior high music students to the local Long island amusement park (Adventureland). It was our annual Spring trip where we would go just to have fun and forget about music. The kids always looked forward to getting me soaked on the bumper boats. We pull up to the place, I go running in to pay the bill and get the wrist bracelets. I get to the office and pronounce, "we're here". They pronouce "we're closed." It turns out, with them being opened on a limited basis that time of year and only for schools, I had the wrong day - my fault!! Well, I wasn't about to return to the buses to tell 200 kids, sorry, I made a mistake. Then, I proceeded to pull a Chevy Chase as in the "Vacation " movie where they drive cross country to an amusement park (Wally World) only to find it closed. Well, I didn't hold a sercurity guard at gunpoint, but I did demand they open the park. I flipped. I told them to call your workers and get some of them here right away as I was banging on the glass. Seeing that I was losing it, and knowing that we go there every year, they opened the park with limited rides and staff following us around to the various rides. We did have fun dammit!
Hey! Did any of you band directors ever...never mind!

Bill Troiano wrote: I flipped.

My band director had a habit of flipping out. Is this common among band directors?

Harold,
If you lived with me, you would probably have done the same or worse. If you have any more questions about my wife we can discuss this off the board, as this does not relate to the current thread.

Well, I must say I am rather disappointed with the quality and quantity of responses, I think there must be a lot of "fessing up" that most are afraid to admit to!!

OK, here goes with mine.

Three summers ago i began tecking (teching?) at a weeklong intensive summer bandcamp. The tuba players were a bunch of overgrown, overfed, rowdy guys who liked to have fun but were good kids at heart. One of the pieces in our show required some very fast tonguing, so I devoted a whole session to fast light articulation. This included practicing articulation away from the horn to develop the tongue. You can probably assume what direction some of the guys took this, if not think of a Robin Williams comedy special from a couple years ago. When they pressed me on other uses for this, I smirked and made the offhand remark "I'll tell you about it when you're eighteen." This was my first year teaching other than privately, Big Mistake. I should have changed the subject or at the very least ignored them. Almost every time I go back to that high school, there is at least one of the guys who will come up to me and say, "Hey, I'm eighteen now, tell me more about what we can do with fast tonguing." I will never live that down, and they will never forget. I am looking forward to when the last of them graduates.

Marty "not that bad, but could have gotten me in real trouble in some systems" Neilan

Just be glad you weren't teaching bass clarinet to the young ladies!
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Joe Baker, who considers veiled references "among the guys" fair game (but who isn't a school administrator)