Do you as a teacher ever come across a new supplemental book for late elementary - early intermediate levels where the fingering printed on the page by the composer/editor/or publisher does not work at all? I have been noticing that quite a bit lately and it's aggravating. Sometimes it's a new composer I'm not familiar with and sometimes it's someone who is one of our well known music education composers. I get out my "white out" (paint pot)and paint the numbers out with the little brush then it dries slowly and I rewrite with the students help, better fingering choices for the important places on the page. Since I teach form and repeatable parts it's easy to spot where the fingering is needed so maybe that is by itself a benefit when corrected. But it's always on new music that I haven't taught before and it catches me and the student unaware. How do you handle this problem in a cheerful way so that the student gets involved in problem solving and doesn't get more confused?

When that happens, I turn it into a teaching moment, showing the student how dumb is the fingering, how it is clumsy or does not work, and how to do it better, in principle and in specifics for that problem, and I often ask for the student's input, if they have been w/me for a while.

Well, fingering at times becomes a personal thing, especially to suit the person's hand size and finger strength. For example, I detest wide horizontal stretches between fingers 3-4 or 2-3 for the sake of legato, yet I find this style of fingering suggested all over the place. I also get annoyed when the editor throws in 2-3-2 on slowly repeated notes, as if changing the fingering there will somehow improve the tone. I also personally prefer to get into traditional scale fingering as soon as possible on long runs, but I acknowledge the fact that several acceptable fingerings exist for most runs.

If you want some extremely poor fingering suggestions, check out the older editions of Czerny. They are absolutely atrocious.