The Joys of Teaching

We've been in a rut for the last few weeks. There's been a lot going on so I haven't found the students' dumb moments quite so endearing lately. Today was much better, though, so I couldn't get angry when one of my beginner french horn players acted like he had just started playing horn last week. That class is usually my best beginner class, except for this one kid that never practices. (No, it's not the kid that cries every class). So today in our warm up we were playing through a mini-chromatic scale that we'd been working on for a about a week and half. I can hear this one kid missing every note, so I asked him to play it for me. The first three notes are C-C#-D. He plays C then tries to put his trigger down on C# and D. For my non-musician friends, you don't put your trigger down on horn til you get up to G#. I said to him, "You don't need your trigger on any of these notes." So he tried again to no avail. I asked him if he had practiced at home on this and he said no so I sent him to the practice room to work it out and told him to come back when he had it worked out. I'm thinking he's going to be gone for 10 minutes. After 30 minutes I go check on him. I asked him to play it for me, so he starts playing and now he's not moving any valves at all. I showed him the fingerings and then he played it fine. I was confused as to why he couldn't do it earlier. Then he said, "I thought you said that there is no triggers on this?" I responded with, "Right, there's not." Then he asks me while wiggling his three valves, "Aren't these triggers?" So he thought he was going to be able to play 8 chromatic notes on an open partial. And he doesn't know his valves from his trigger. If the rest of the class wasn't awesome I would have really questioned my decision to teach music.