Darrell Branaman

MUSE 250
Dr. Palmer
I did my brass teaching with the trumpet and with a girl named Claire Pace. Claire has

never been involved in music. I wanted to put myself through a real life scenario of having a

student that is starting from the ground level. I learned the difficulty of the teaching a student that

has never had musical instruction. After watching my lesson over and over there are many good

things that I did in my lesson and things I wasnt prepared for. The part of the lesson that I wasnt

prepared for ended up being what I would like to redo in my next lessons.

My main goal for this lesson was for Claire to produce a sound with a good buzz on the

mouthpiece. I am glad that I went about teaching the trumpet the way I did. I made sure to show

Claire how to assemble the trumpet. I explained the parts of the trumpet and what they did. I also

made sure to show her how to fix a very common problem for young trumpet players. I made

sure to go about teaching the parts of the trumpet so that she had an understanding of the

trumpet, to the point that she could practice it without supervision. One of the biggest problems

young brass players have is that they dont use enough air. This is why I made sure that Claire

took a deep breath in and out while I was watching to make sure that she wasnt tensing up. I

also made sure when I was explaining how to form the embouchure, that I showed it with my

lips before I had her try it. I think all of these steps are good to do the way that I did them with

the student observing first before trying to produce a sound.

The problems with this lesson was I expected Claire to struggle significantly with

producing a pitch. In the video it is observed she produced the sound on the first try. This caught

me by surprise, and I wasnt sure where to go with it. I tried to teach her Fere Jaques by rote.

The problem was that she couldnt produce the concert Bb consistently, instead she produced the
Bb and the concert G. Then I decided to work on tonguing and the starting of a note. This made

the lesson seem scattered and disorganized.

My biggest take away from this lesson is that I should have been prepared for Claire to

produce the note on her first try. I should have stuck more with my lesson. Instead of abandoning

teaching the song to Claire and switching to tonguing. I should have stayed with the song, or just

tried to teach her a couple of different pitches. I could have in a later lesson built off of the

pitches to teach her a simple song by rote. I just could hear so many different aspects of her

playing that I wanted to fix. Instead of trying to fix many things I should have just focused on

one of them and worked on it. I think this was a great learning experience. I cant wait to teach

again so that I can use this experiences to become a better music educator for my future students.