Grade 5 recorder pupil got confused over the fingering for certain notes and said dismissively:

"Oh well, I don't *do* notes".

Assistant in the music shop yesterday:

Well, you teachers have a good rate of pay.

Given that many shop assistants are paid £6 or £7 an hour, you do!

I get paid about £8 an hour, so it used to take me over 5 hours (I do pay some tax and NI) to earn enough to pay for one of BerkshireSon's £40 an hour clarinet lessons and over 4 hours to pay for his £30 an hour piano lessons. It's a hard life being a teacher!

Everything's relative I suppose. I feel I can say that since I don't charge as much as your son's clarinet or piano teachers!

Well said!
Reading comments in this forum regarding rates and working conditions for private teachers, you wonder if many of them have any idea what the world is like for someone like yourself, and the sacrifice you have to make to give your children lessons.

By the way- I'm a private music teacher myself.

This assistant is very observant and is correct. You could reply next time to the observation;

"Yes we do, its great isn't it? And we are worth what we charge!".

Saying 'bye' to a pupil on Wednesday: little brother in car, mum and daughter between car and our front door, I see a gorgeous dog being taken for a walk by a tall young man.

'Oh, ' I enthuse ' look - how handsome is that ?! '

Mum looks round - just as the dog and his man pass behind the parked car. Oh dear - dog is out of sight.

For a few seconds mum sees me in a new light.

Could take a while to live that down, maggiemay!

If you have a vision for one year then raise potatoes.
If you have a vision for ten years then raise a grape vine.
If you have a vision for fifty years then become a music pedagogue, and raise the next generation.

They're very good at quotes like that, the Hungarians...

Ah! JudithJ got there before me!

The quote itself, and the way it was delivered, had me in tears (and I wasn't the only one)...

I find that quite offensive and very rude. We could go into a long discussion about what teachers really 'earn' out of their hourly rate (Dugazon gives a very good explanation on that point), but we've been there before. As you're not a private teacher, I don't think you really know anything about it, and you're making an assumption based on comparing what you pay for your child's lessons with what you earn.

Me...well at the moment, I'm earning ?36 a month from teaching - sometimes that's the reality of being self-employed.

?36? Presumably you're only teaching for an hour and a half a month?? You can't really make any comparison with any other job on that basis.

I don't find Berkshiremum's comment rude or offensive in the slightest, certainly not in comparison to the response to it.

Good for you, but I think this is the attitude a lot of people have, and I don't agree that's the case. Trying to make comparison between what someone who is employed 'earns', and what someone who is self-employed is 'paid' is pretty difficult, because they are very different things. Berkshiremum is making a comparison between what she 'earns' and what her child's music teacher is 'paid', the assumpting being that the latter is the same as the music teacher earns. For various reasons, I am only teaching for 90 minutes a week (oops...I put month instead of week); I say that only to reinforce the point that being self-employed is not always as easy and carefree as a lot of people seem to think it is.

Anyway, this is very off-topic and is detracting from the interesting things people have written. I do wish though that sometimes people would think about what they write and how it comes across.

I don't think Berkshire Mum was having a go at music teachers. Her point was that she earns only ?8 an hour, so the cost of music lessons represented many more hours work for her than she was paying for in teaching. OK the music teacher is a skilled worker, with overheads and expenses to cover and may not see much of that ?40 in cashflow, but nevertheless, it is five times what BM is paid per hour, so I can see her point, and it is hardly "offensive". Get down off your high horse, SG.

Hope your son appreciates what you have done for him, BM!

Well said SueHM

Sorry - maybe this just touched a nerve with me at the moment, but I get fed up of people thinking that because I charge ?24, this is what I end up with. I wish it were, but it's not.

Apologies if my remarks upset you, Seer Green. I probably didn't think enough about how they would come across, and I do realise that you won't see all of the money you charge. I'm sure it is difficult being self-employed and having to find enough pupils to make ends meet. I was just trying to point out that many people do not earn as much per hour as music teachers do, and that it's not always easy for parents to pay the going rate for music lessons.

I don't begrudge what I've had to pay for lessons for my son. It's thanks enough that he has learnt to play well, and derives enormous enjoyment from his music. If you'd been on the forums longer, you would know that I think BerkshireSon's clarinet teacher is one of the best things that happened to him in his whole life - she is absolutely amazing. I'm only grateful that I was able to pay for her lessons; they were worth every penny of that ?40. I am lucky to be in a position where my husband earns enough for day-to-day living, so that my salary could be used for "the icing on the cake", like music lessons.

On trying to reassure a student that the house-spider I've safely put outside the cat-flap wasn't that huge I completely forget that my boys' large plastic beetle is sitting in the prime location to be confused in the half-light
"It's not that!" she said.

"No! ! " I replied horrified, wondering whether she thought I was now keeping tarantulas loose as house-guests, "It was a decent sized house-spider but not that big! Besides that's a plastic insect, it only has six legs!"