Never correct a mistake by singing the right note yourself.  This would be teaching by imitation—­as we teach a bird to sing a tune—­not teaching by method.

Remember that we are not aiming at artistic performance in a sight-singing class, so do not hammer away at a tune until the performance of it has reached your ideal.  If you do, your aim is ’performance’—­not sight-singing.

If a child makes a mistake in dictation, do not tell it what is wrong, unless you are very short of time.  Get it to sing the phrase it has written to Sol-fa names—­in this way it will find out its own mistake.

In writing notes, either on the blackboard or on manuscript paper, it is not necessary to fill up all the space between the lines, as is done in printed music.  If children are allowed to do this, they will spend a long time over their exercises.  Teach them to turn all tails of notes up which are written on lines or spaces below the third line, and down for those above.  The direction of the tails of notes on the third line itself will depend on the context.  These directions refer, of course, to the writing of melodies.  It is often necessary to remind even grown-up students that accidentals must be placed before the note affected, not after it; also that a dot after a note which is written on a line must come on the space next above, not on the line itself.  Children often forget that the leading note in a minor key invariably carries an accidental.

We must now say a little on the subject of revision.  It is a fault of the young teacher that she often entirely neglects this, with the result that her class can only sing accurately at sight, and do dictation in, the last key learned.  During the first few lessons in a new key it is certainly inadvisable to give exercises in the preceding ones, as the whole attention must be concentrated on the new tonality.  But other keys should be taken at least once in three weeks.  An impatient person may say:  ‘But properly taught children could not forget so soon!’ Yet, at times, we are all hazy on almost any subject, but it does not follow that we are either fools, or badly taught:  we are simply human!  After all, machines get out of order, so why not the most complicated machine of all—­the human mind?

Again, it is only the inexperienced teacher who thinks her class has been badly taught by her predecessor.  Many a student in training is inclined, after the first lesson with a new class, to come to the distracting conclusion that the children know ‘nothing’.  This generally means that, after the holidays, the former work needs a little revision before new work is begun.

In taking a fairly advanced class a teacher is often worried because there is not enough time in a single forty-minute lesson a week to touch on all of such subjects as chords, cadences, extemporizing, transposition, &c., in addition to sight-singing and dictation.  It is certainly quite impossible to do so, and this is one of the reasons for apparently slow progress.  But there is, however, a good side to the difficulty, for such work ought not to be hurried, and it is well to leave a little breathing space between the references to it.