Believe it or not, I was a traveling guitar teacher for a brief stint of a few months. It was somewhere before I started writing professionally (and full-time), and the wife and I were having The Talk to find a way in which to generate a side-income – and of course, relying on talents, we decided that guitar teaching would be a natural way to do it.

The students (or their parents) would book a lesson in advance, and I’d show up on the day – usually with a guitar strapped to my back – having walked a block or so to get to whatever meeting place the student chose.

I don’t teach guitar today, at least not at the moment, and more of my time goes towards playing bridge, poker, blackjack and other things done with cards. Some of the knowledge has carried over – and I’ve put together a few tips that might help bridge teachers to get information through to young students.

Sometimes Letting a Student Lead

Some students are very inquisitive – and have very specific things that they want to know from the lesson or the teacher. They ask a lot of questions, they might side-track a lot of the lesson by asking things they’ve always wondered.

Often, they want to know things that might be a little beyond their experience. Tell them anyway: Sometimes it’s okay to let the student lead, and it’s okay to let them ask all of these questions.

These types of students will stay interested – and learn fast – if you let them lead. But if you force them into one direction, they’re going to lose interest, and just a little bit of adaptation in teaching methods could have kept their attention.

Kibitzing: Watch Their Hands, Kid

Something that I consider of utmost importance in both teaching guitar and instructing in bridge is the ability to watch other players doing it – and to learn as much as you can from what they’re doing.

Any guitar student enjoys going through a song they know and learning to play through it (even if you hold off on the techniques behind it, showing them this helps them learn these techniques in practice even before they learn the names).

The same is true for bridge students. Encourage any bridge student to get into kibitzing early on – and to consider this a separate, very important part of their bridge study.

“Watch their hands, kid.”

That’s advice that counts in both fields.

There’s a Right Book for Everyone

Drilling music theory into my head was very, very unsuccessful for several years in a row until I found the right series of books that did the trick for me. Judge if you will, but the Complete Idiot’s Guide and For Dummies clicked, but an entire stack of other books on the same topic didn’t – and the same is true for a lot of students out there.

There’s a right book for everyone. There’s also no point in forcing someone to read a book when they don’t click with it – simple as that. Suggest another book, article or resource if you notice that you’ve shown a student something a few times without the information going in. Often times that’s what you need.

Stuck? Try A Dirty Joke

I only recommend this one for older bridge students: The ones old enough not to get in trouble with their parents – and preferably students old enough to no longer live with them. If there’s a concept that you can’t get to stick in a student’s head despite trying several times and lessons over, there’s probably a dirty joke about it (or a dirty limerick that can be made up on the spot) that will make the information stick.

For whatever reason, things like off-color rhymes and dirty limericks are far more likely to stick than information presented in a repetition-function – and even a huge chunk of school teachers will admit this, too.

Don’t Confuse Your Student

There are core concepts: Bidding in bridge, and scales in music. Sure, these need to become second nature to the student – but always remember that there are also a thousand different ways of getting this information across.

Don’t confuse the student with all of this information on the first day, even though it’s tempting to do it as a teacher who realizes they need to know all of it. It has the potential to scare off new students.

Instead, your first few lessons are often spent just getting a feel for what direction the rest of the lessons will take. It’s fine if you spend the first lessons answering questions from the student – it helps to grab their interest rather than overwhelm.

For this, I’ve found Just Declare a great introduction for introducing people to the basic rules of bridge without throwing them with books full of bidding information: Take it easy, take a deep breath, just familiarize yourself with what a game is supposed to look like – from there, move on.

Remember The Teacher You Hated? 

Can you still remember what you hated most about a teacher – the teacher or subject you learned the least from just because you hated the teaching method? Think back, because I think every single student on earth probably had one.

Some teachers were inordinately cold or harsh, some teachers hated questions (or just seemed to hate people on their bad days). Whatever this was for you, don’t do this to your student.

As a teacher, be what you wanted your teachers to be.

Yes, A Student Can Be “Too Sick”

One of the first things I learned while trying to teach guitar to students was the fact that students can – and sometimes are – way too sick for a lesson. When time gets to teaching and the student isn’t able to focus for more than a few minutes at a time, it’s fine to insist that you call the lesson off and set another time.

I’ve seen both parents and students insist that a lesson “has to go on” when there would have been no point to it. It’s okay to reschedule in this case – and advised if you want the student to continue learning anything at all.