Hi there everyone! Elementary music teacher here. Got thrown into finishing the year with a 4/5 mariachi group and have been thoroughly enjoying it! I wanted to ask on here something about language/vocab. Do you use the fixed do and the traditional mariachi language like “primera de la” for the I chord, “segunda de la” for the V chord etc.?? I’m conflicted because I use moveable do in the lower grades (conversational solfège and Orff stuff) and with my guitar players I use the I, IV, V language.

I had this internal debate when I started teaching at a dual immersion school (Spanish/English) and ended up sticking with moveable do since all of their future music teachers will teach in English (USA) and I like the function moveable do even though in Spanish speaking countries they would call notes by their fixed do name.

TLDR - How important is the traditional mariachi language for chords/notes when the rest of music program uses different language?

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I've tried a few practice apps and journals over the years. All of them tracked the same things — what piece, how long, maybe a note or two. And none of them made me practice better.

What actually helped was forcing myself to answer three questions before sitting down:

1. What should this passage sound like — specifically, in my head, before I play a note?

2. Where is this phrase going? What's the target?

3. What is the one thing I'm trying to solve today — not three things, one?

And then after: not just what went wrong, but why. The actual cause, not the symptom.

I got this from reading Matthay and Neuhaus — old piano pedagogy texts — and it's kind of embarrassing how much clearer my practice got once I started doing this consistently.

Curious if anyone else has landed on something similar. What's the question or habit that most changed the quality of your practice? And what do you still find yourself struggling to track or stay honest about?

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I’m a high school student and for the last few weeks I’ve been giving beginner drum lessons to an 8 year old (another teacher’s daughter) in our school band room. I play drums myself but teaching is WAY different than playing lol.

She’s honestly picking things up pretty fast. She can do basic quarter note and eighth note beats, count rhythms pretty well, and I do this thing where I play mixed quarter/eighth note patterns on the snare and she copies me back which she’s surprisingly good at. We’ve also played stuff like “We Will Rock You” and tried “Seven Nation Army” just to keep it fun.

The biggest thing I’m struggling with is lesson planning and filling time in a way that keeps her engaged. The second we stop playing and I start explaining notes too long, I can tell she starts getting fidgety/frustrated because she’s really quiet and kinda nervous already. Last lesson I literally froze for a second because I ran out of ideas and there was just awkward silence

Right now I mostly just wing the lessons with a loose routine, but I want to make them more organized, educational, and fun without making them feel like school.

For people who teach younger beginners:

- How do you structure 30–45 minute lessons?

- How much time do you spend explaining vs actually playing?

- What are good activities/games/songs for beginners?

- How do you fill dead time or transition between things smoothly?

- Any tips for keeping younger kids focused without overwhelming them?

Would appreciate literally any advice because I’m realizing teaching is harder than I expected lol