I've been teaching a male adult pupil for around two months now with one lesson per week. The problem is that he is extremely nervous to the point he almost cannot play. I've never encountered this before and i'm not sure how best to tackle this situation. I am in my late twenties and this chap must be around mid fifties (I say this as i'm not sure if he's nervous of ME personally!) He shuffles around, moves the music about on the stand, coughs, checks his mobile, writes things down etc. I always feel that i put people at their ease, am chatty, friendly, have a sense of humour and get on fine with all my pupils old and young. I'm just a bit perplexed at what to do. He also tells me every lesson that he's sure there's something wrong with his instrument which there isn't as i've checked thoroughly. He says he can play everything at home absolutely fine but cannot do it during the lesson. Any advice? Thanks.

Do you take time doing some nice gentle warm ups?
Have you tried playing with him?
What is he like if you take the first attempt as a trial? Does a second go improve things?

Hi

Hope you don't mind a student answering but I have been in this situation myself. Even though I have performed quite a bit as a trumpet player I have been playing piano for just over two years and went through a stage of walking into a lesson being unable to complete one bar of a piece that at home was fairly well on the way!
My teacher ended up greeting me for the lesson and going into another room on pretence of having to get something and told me to run through my pieces. One play through and I relaxed. The problem for me is it was a self fulfilling prophecy. I thought I would be unable to play in the lesson so therefore I couldn't. Just having that short time to relax helped me alot!

I am another student not a teacher and I must admit that I did used to suffer from nerves myself with my teacher. I was fortunate in the fact that I did know this teacher initially as she had already been teaching my son for a couple of years prior to this.

But just noting some of the comments that you have said I can picture myself doing a lot of the same things in the early days. For example, shuffling around, moving the music about etc - sometimes sitting there wishing that the time was over. As I got used to my teacher I became a lot more relaxed and to be honest now I very rarely feel nervous with her at all.

I would give him time, and maybe start on something really easy so that he can get the chance to relax and not feel under pressure.

Is your student new to the instrument or just started again as an adult? It could be that he is expecting so much of himself and then when he can't do it because of nerves is going to pieces and using the old thing - blaming his tools. For me, I blamed my glasses - well actually I still do sometimes if I can't get something right!

ET

That might not work for everyone.
I've never been able to do that.
I might just about now but when teachers did that to me I'd freeze worse than if they were in the room.

I encourage nervous pupils to "babble" on the instrument to warm up - this involves playing random rubbish - there's no right and wrong. We explore playing as quietly as possible and as loudly, all random notes. Then when we move towards playing pieces I give permission to get it wrong.

Demonstrate yourself, drop a few wrong notes, say whoops and then play correctly! It gives him permission not to play perfectly. Done with humour it has helped me bridge the gap with nervous pupils.

I too suffer from this affliction to the point that I shake so much I cannot play the piano.

I think personally speaking, the reason I become so nervous is that I want to perform as well as I possibly can so put pressure on myself which in fact causes the bad performance! Its almost if I didn't care I would play so much better.

Also I can feel really confident before hand but the second I start to press the notes on the keyboard, I get almost a Performance stage fright and my mind goes blank.

I sometimes have to record my pieces to show my teacher so she can see that I can actually play them. And I couldn't even record myself up until recently because of my nerves.

Could you have a chat with your student and explain that this is totally normal, that when he practices it's not a performance, it's ok to make lots of mistakes and as someone else suggested go out of the room initially. I wish my teacher would do that! And that eventually the nerves will ease with time. It may take years, so to be patient. You could also point out issues that you have when playing, as it would make your student realise even at an advanced level of playing we all still make mistakes when learning pieces. If you do play perfectly then make it up!

If he knows that you are not expecting a polished performance each time then, he might ease up, slightly. But I would say don't expect rapid change.

I have also noticed that songs that I start with my teacher I tend to play better than ones I have started on my own and say look what I have learnt (or not as I usually can't play it!).

Hope this helps.

When it's a duet or my teacher is accompanying in some way, then I tend to feel I play better. Whether I do or not is quite a different thing! But he can often push me to play faster / louder / 'more confidently' than when I'm on my own.

I've just realised that at most lessons, at some point he has to go off and fetch his recorder. I know that he teaches at a school on that day, so I assume he just doesn't unpack instruments until he needs i them in a lesson at his house...now I wonder if he goes off to give me a moment or two of 'I'm outside the room and so can't hear you' Though to be fair he does leave the door open so I know he can't really 'not hear me'

I would agree with this. Thinking back to when I was a slightly self conscious pupil, when my teachers used to demonstrate and make a few mistakes it did help me to relax a bit more and not worry about not sounding perfect while I was still learning a piece. However speaking as a teacher, I worry that pupils may think I'm not competent if I make mistakes in my playing. Sometimes they seem to expect a lot from both the teacher and themselves. I'm sure it would be helpful to show them, as somebody said in an earlier post, that even professional musicians make mistakes when they don't know a piece well.

I am the same. Just playing the same line as me helps (it doesn't have to be a separate accompaniment).

The other thing my teacher would do was let me play everything twice before making any comments, that way I could get the nerves partly out of my system the first time.

It was only last year (after I'd been learning with the same teacher for a bit over four years) that he said he finally felt I was relaxed in lessons so, as Minimo says, it is probably going to take some time.

You could try pointing out that if your pupil could play everything perfectly then he wouldn't need lessons and you wouldn't have a job and that mistakes in lessons are useful since they give you an indication of what needs working on.

He has presumably started playing because he likes the sound of the instrument played by a professional and is probably only too aware that what he is producing bears no resemblance whatsoever to the CDs he has at home. Is there any possibility of a pupil's concert where he could just listen to other beginners playing? That way he would realise that he is not as awful as he fears and that you are used to listening to pupils playing the way he does.

Also, if he is in his fifties and hasn't had a lesson in anything since he left school, he might just not know what a pupil is supposed to do in a lesson. Is it possible for him to arrive five minutes before you finish your previous lesson (on the pretext of getting his instrument out and being ready to start playing dead on time) and he could then see how you interact with other students.

Another thing which my teacher did which helped me was to get me to play only a tiny snippet - sometimes only two notes - several times over, to get a given point across, exactly as should be happening when practising at home. Difficult to do with very tiny sections without seeming patronising when early on in the learning process, but if you keep the sections smaller than makes musical sense on its own, that takes some of the pressure to produce music out of the equation...Then, if I started to appear flustered, when playing those two or few notes in a bigger context, he'd say, "well, you've demonstrated you can actually do that bit now, so I'll leave you to get on with it at home". That again takes pressure off.

I get uptight if I think I'm being tested, and that is the case even yet: at a recent masterclass-y sort of lesson with an eminent recorder player, I found that when he wanted everything to be perfect, and wanted every perfect thing to be linked up to everything else (two separate processes ), I also got nervy and began to make more and more mistakes, so your student has my sympathy. I was desperate to show that I could respond to what he was trying to get me to do, but trying to do it, instead of just letting it happen, began to get in the way. If it's any consolation to your student, six years ago I would have been almost as extremely uptight as he sounds to be if I even suspected someone might be overhearing my playing, but through that first recorder teacher, I've got to the point of being able to play, unaccompanied, to an audience, to examiners, and even to Philip Thorby.

As long as you can demonstrate competently 99% of the time and make mistakes only when you chose to do so, incorporate humour so they realise you are actually trying to put them at their ease, there really isn't a problem. I've not had a student stop coming because of it, let me put it that way!