If you have observed the teacher teaching in the fashion, don't you expect similar methods to be employed on yourself? I see no good reason to treat a student in this way, and I advise you look for another teacher ASAP.

It takes time for adults to realize they are safe in the studio. What happens to these students while they are finding out just how safe, is that they are guarded and afraid. When they're afraid they quit breathing normally, they leave their bodies and go into their heads; and to control their feelings, they start thinking frantically. They try too hard.

When I get like this, I start making stupid mistakes that only make things worse. Instructions become incomprehensible. I don't know my left hand from my right. I don't like myself and I want to run away. It's no different with other students.

What I realized, and what we then talked about, was that my feeling was the same as hers when she was playing for her teacher as a child. She'd be intently involved in her music making when the teacher would yell and scare her. In the present case, I was the teacher so I could get annoyed and tell her to quit. But when it happened to her, she was the child and the student. If she'd reacted to her teacher as I reacted to her, she would have been called rude and impudent and this particular teacher would have hit her. I've seen this woman make a mistake and cover her head to ward off the impending blow.

How can people be totally involved in their learning if they are waiting for someone to yell at them or hit them? A part of them must always be watching and waiting for the interruption or attack. I don't yell at my students, young or old.

The final irony of this sad tale is that the woman was her teacher's best student. She was working on Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata at the age of 12. Her teacher had never had such a gifted student. Why did she feel the need to treat her student this way? People do not understand that there are problems being a teacher's best student.

Some excerpts from Musicalfossils, where teacher Matte Harre talks about people who have had abusive teachers and are trying to resume lessons many years later with the aftereffects:



It doesn't appear to me that the behavior of the childhood teacher has done much to improve that student's musicianship. It's created roadblocks.

Here is another, where a *gifted* adult student has berated herself in the manner that her childhood teacher has done, and they get to the bottom of it:



This page is worth reading in its entirety.

the bruises they suffered in their education as children ... interfere

I hope that anyone who still romanticizes abuse as some kind of spice leading to artistry will stop doing so.

In Malaysia is it normal to hit children at home, school?