With this COVID-19 pandemic affecting our world, disrupting our routines, and changing how we’ve done things, students have had to address the challenge of learning violin through online lessons for the time being.
In this short blog, we’ll address just a couple of the biggest challenges we have faced with teaching online violin lessons
1. Keeping the Attention of Younger Violin Students
We’ve found that it is much easier to keep the attention of our younger students when we are in person with them at our school location. If you thought keeping their attention focused in person was hard before the pandemic, now we all wish we could go back to those days ASAP.
Wth kids about ages 10 and under, we need the parents to sit in the online violin lesson in order to help keep the young student focused during their lesson time. Parents have been understanding of this and have been very cooperative. Still, we know that they too are probably looking forward to getting back to the way things were for their child’s music lesson experience.
2. Teaching Body Postures for Playing Violin
We’ve also found the biggest challenge across all ages is teaching proper body postures for playing violin. At our school’s site, we would be able to correct a student’s posture by standing side-by-side with them so they can visually see the concept we are trying to teach. If that didn’t work, we would be able to physically move their arms, wrists, chin, etc to change their posture to what we needed it to be for a better technic.
But with learning violin through online lessons, we have found this to be another one of the bigger challenges we face when trying to teach students.
One Positive Aspect to Teaching Violin Through Online Lessons
There is one positive side that we have seen with teaching online violin lessons. And that is that teachers are challenged with their use of words and how they explain things.
In a way, it’s kind of like a game where you are given a challenge to accomplish (teach violin) and have to do so with limited resources (the limits that come with teaching online. It does make teachers evaluate their language use for more clarity to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interactions.
Needless to say, teaching online violin lessons is not our favorite approach to training in this instrument. Unless the student is already established in their instrument, that is. Then that is another experience entirely. But most of our students are beginners to the violin. Other instruments are easier to teach online, but the violin is not the easiest. Particularly, as we mentioned, for younger students.
In the end, if you are trying to decide if you want to get into the world of teaching violin through online lessons, these would be our main points to consider.