@ DanielB

I strongly agree with your point of view about teachers.

Basically, one has to be persistent enough to to go further and to reach the point of success. Once, one of my friends said, "in general, most of those who received a Ph.D degree was not because they were smarter than other people, but because they are more persistent."  The same is probably true for your guitar class and many violin (or any other music) students!

i was one of those stubborn one, if not, I would have quit piano lessons within a year, but I did not even though I didn't have an instrument to practice with. What I got out of those years is I was good at theory and I could still play a few songs:)

One thing I really like about my daughter's violin teacher is she made a point when I went to one of her workshops for parents: If your child's teacher do not want you (the parents) to be involved (e.g., sit in the lessons) you should not have him/her. I think it is because, like Daniel had said, when a child is little, a lot of his/her success depends on the parents and teachers who could guide them, watch for their mistakes and correct them, help them establish a practice routine, encourage them to practice, challenge them appropriately, and help them to the point of self-motivated status where the child could practice on his/her own....

Fiddlerman said
It's nice to see that myguitarnow noticed that I am open-minded. I like to think so anyway.

I agree with MGN even though I haven't have you directly as my teacher, but from the communications we all have here in this forum. Open mind is one of the qualities my daughter's violin teacher has, too.

The truth is that I've had a lot of colleagues that criticize the Suzuki method. The thing is that they don't have very valid reasons for being negative, IMAO.

I wonder those who criticize the Suzuki method know exactly what Suzuki method is (same thing happened in my field: "professionals" developed assessment tools to assess children's ability and classroom quality but most of them had never really worked in a classroom). Below, I respond to the FM's comments about general critisism regarding the Suzuki method, not to argue on behalf of the Suzuki profession but to show how an open-minded teacher (like my daughter's teacher) would use the Suzuki method as a guideline and supplement it with other necessary qualities that are important to music learning. I don't mean to annoy or offend anybody.

I've frequently here things like, it encourages them to have fun but not work, it doesn't teach to read music early enough.

Yes, my daughter is encouraged to have fun, the main purpose is not to push her too hard so the resistence occurs and she loses interest. So far it works just fine.

The kids have very reduced sight reading capabilities.

My daughter learns to read music before she reads English. Yes, her teacher has not taught her to read music directly, but she includes sight reading in the curriculum, we, the parents are involved in sight reading and theory. My daughter learns theory through games and stories and she loves it!

I personally do not memorize pieces very well (I'm good at sight reading) so when I play with my daughter, she plays from her memory and I play by reading music. Eventually, she picks that up and where there's a difficult part she wants to read the music. She also learns to write the fingering down (from me) on the music. Her teacher commented that what she has done is okay because that is one way of learning, too, but she does not want her read off fingerings only (those she wrote down for us, the parents, to read on my daughter's practice book).

I suppose there are plenty of great Suzuki violinists out there but I don't know them. I would love to have some great conversations about

• a tendency towards rote learning and mechanistic group performance at the xpense of individual musicianship

Yes, my daughter memorizes what she learns (she has better memory than I do), but most great musicians perform without reading music. Rote learning trains their memory skill.

if music is to be learned from audio recordings, the quality of the recorded pieces must be questioned in terms of style, integrity, and its positive or negative traits. The resulting views are relative and may differ between people.

We use audio recordings, the purpose is to get my daughter to be familiar with pieces she plays. When she begins to learn a new piece, she knows what notes come next. I remember one of the FM members said his/her dad listened to a lot of great pieces and he/she listened along as a child, so when he/she came to play that piece he/she was already familiar with that piece. I think that is what my daughter's teacher wants.  In addition, the way my daughter's teacher teaches (playing by ear) her makes me think that the Suzuki put a lot of emphasis on ear training; for example, now when I play a note, my daughter is able to tell me the note's name, whereas I can't.

• any reliance on listening to a single piece in order to learn it is not sufficient for instilling a sense of the style of the work (where the style refers to the traits of performance that are common to many similar works), since a style can only be acquired by listening to a range of works of common style (including listening to works for enjoyment, rather than with only the goal of copying them).

My daughter listens to music other than the Suzuki recordings for her enjoyment and her teacher encourages (parents should do the same) that. In addition, at this point, i don't care about the style and i don't think my daughter cares either.

Oliver, the second scan is upside down.  

All i can say - a good teacher is a BIG advantage definitelly! There are LOTS of things that should be fixed, which professional can see and a player - not. And i still can pick pieces to play that i like. And she teaches me for free lately - don't know why, don't ask, russians are strange.