Membership Expired Beckie Tunnicliffe
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I don’t really want to travel to Birmingham though for just a coffee? Especially if some people are coming from quite far? The Slug & Lettuce buffet is only £10 a head
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Ok here is an update! He’s decided he isn’t going to do his Grade 1 anymore, he still thinks he doesn’t have a good enough voice to do it. So fair enough, I’m not going to push him if it is not something he wants to particularly do right now. I suggested the filming to him and he seems up for it.
His mum has had a chat with me tonight as he won’t open up in lessons to me, he wants to focus on tones and develop a ‘nicer’ sound. I was going to take him through Estill’s 6 tones for singing anyway but can anyone else suggest anything I could do? He gets embarrassed very easily and I was struggling to get him to do ‘sob’ tones tonight…I just said if he wants to improve his tones he needs to sing all of these different ones! We’ve already covered opening up his throat and relaxation.
We’re also going to look at getting his tongue out of the way so I’ve photocopied some sheets for him and explained it all to him, whether he will find the courage to practice it I don’t know…
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Thanks! I’ll give it a go when he next has his lesson 🙂
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Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis🙂
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My memory is so poor…lol, I forgot again haha
Anyway, an update on what happened. It took me a few days to actually call after I originally posted this so I could think about what I should say! I ended up calling his Mum’s PA as I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to talk to his Mum, as I have nearly always spoken to the PA regarding his lessons and she isn’t the most fluent in English.
He had another lesson in the time between posting and calling, and once again he forgot his notebook so I used this to begin my concerns rather than jumping in and going through the worser things! When I rang another receptionist answered the phone and she said she would remind him about the book….so I then brought up the toilet issue, to which she replied “Oh yeah….can I call you later as he is sat next to me”, so I knew there must be something up!
The PA (who is lovely by the way) rang me the next day and told me that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, which is why he is constantly back and forth to the toilet in the lessons as he looses his concentration. Now I try to keep my lessons as practical as possible, but I was struggling to do so with him spending half of the lesson out of the hour in the toilet. This made me question why he was doing an hour if he wasn’t up to it….
The PA thought she had told me about the Asperger’s but she hadn’t, and I also told her his Mum hadn’t told me either when she filled out the student agreement in the very first lesson, which has a specific question along the lines of “Does the student have any medical conditions that I must be made aware of?”. On the form she either wrote No or crossed a line through it, to which I was told she did this because she can’t accept that her son has this condition and so will not admit it. Very frustrating as I could have suited the lessons more around it.
He came to his next lesson with a friend who filmed his lesson as evidence for the DoE, which threw me a bit as I have never been filmed teaching a lesson before! He was on his best behaviour so someone must have spoken to him, and also probably because he was on film!
On Monday I had another phone call from the PA to inform me he would not be continuing with lessons. The main reason was that it was incredibly far for him to travel (and honestly I’m surprised he managed to keep the lessons up for as long as he did with the distance he travelled) and that she felt he wasn’t committed enough and she would rather I spend my time teaching someone who would practice every week and concentrate in the lessons. I’m relieved about it, but frustrated as I had just found out how to deliver his lessons and work them around his condition. As we would all probably say, it’s experience at the end of the day.
So there we go, sorry for the essay! 😛
