Good Manners, Concert Etiquette
Teaching proper conduct to students and children is a long term task
Why is it so difficult to teach and enforce good concert etiquette with our students? The answer may be in how you teach it to begin with!
Encouraging young people to use good manners and proper etiquette while attending musical and other performances is often easier said than done. The problem is that most people wait until just minutes before an event or performance to tell their children or students what to do and how to act. To teach a child proper manners requires a little bit more advanced planning.
Displaying Proper Concert Etiquette and Good Manners Begins With Respect
Being a musician requires practice. Being a great musician requires LOTS of practice. As adults we recognize the fact that good manners dictate that we respect the hard work and time that a performer has put in to prepare the performance we are watching. For younger students this intrinsic respect for the performer may not make as much sense. Try bringing the discussion down to their level and draw parallels to something that is important in their own lives.
Make Manners Mean Something To The Student!
How would your children feel if their parents never attended their baseball games? How would they feel if they worked for days on a school project and then the teacher acted as though their hard work did not even matter? In both cases they would probably feel very sad or at least discouraged from continuing to work so hard. Psychologically young students are more aware of what makes someone sad or upset. If you can in some way demonstrate that bad concert etiquette makes the performer feel bad then you can more easily and effectively encourage good behavior and concert manners as the proper way to act at a musical performance. Once they have a point of reference a child is more likely to accept the change in behavior that you are trying to instill.
The whole idea of showing respect for a person by using good manners and proper concert etiquette is to build a sense of common courtesy that is important both in and out of the concert hall. Since good manners are so important in all areas of life it makes sense to try to get other teachers involved in teaching them as well. Most schools do an excellent job of encouraging good manners in the lower grades, but as students grow older the reinforcement of good manners and concert etiquette in the classroom takes a back seat to academic issues. Speak with other teachers and see if they can work with you to encourage the good and ignore the bad.
Teaching Concert Etiquette Should Be A Continuous Process
Don't wait until the day before your children are to go to see a concert to try to teach them proper concert etiquette. At that point it is often too late to have any real impact. Threatening a child with a negative consequence for bad manners only serves to make the child dislike the activity they are watching! Encouraging good manners and discouraging bad ones is something that takes time and constant reiteration. Above all, as with many things in education, praise your children publicly when they display the hallmarks of proper concert etiquette and manners.
For more information about the topic of what proper concert etiquette really is, please see my article on the subject here at Suite101.
