The pupils are paying for their lessons and are entitled to courteous treatment. Avoid the nervous, irritable teacher. The teacher who becomes impatient or ruffled because a pupil cannot instantly grasp his meaning, walking up and down the floor with clenched fists chastising the air, and in every way displaying his own nerves and lack of self-control, is not a teacher, but a fool. Such a person has either forgotten his own earlier struggles or had never studied.
Avoid the teacher with a hobby. There is nothing so barren in the world as one idea, spring from one idea, nourished by one idea and aiming at one idea. This includes the teacher who believes in keeping the pupil on one tone for six months. While your tone needs more than six months to become perfect, dwelling on that one tone alone for that length of time would be decidedly wrong.
We frequently accept students who have acquired numerous bad habits in breathing or singing. They often know their trouble and ask how long it will take to undo this work and get back into the right way. They seem to think it is a matter of a certain time working back to the beginning and then starting over again. This is not true. It is a matter of beginning now and beginning right. The thoughts of a pupil should be advance, not retreat. You must not think of what you have done, but what you must do.
Avoid the teacher who advances theories and mechanical contrivances. A laryngoscope in the hands of a physician might save many lives, but in the hands of a singing teacher may ruin many voices. The perfect teacher uses the simplest demonstrations, realizing that technical terms go entirely over the heads of the beginner. The following suggestions are entirely useless:
Sing the tone forward.
Sing the tone on the teeth.
Sing over your larynx.
Sing that tone with the epiglottis lowered, the palate raised, and on the end of the breath.
I have personally heard these instructions given to pupils, and I assure you the pupil did not gain anything by it.
It is positively absurd to insist on a beginner knowing the structures of the vocal chords, neither will the patting, pinching or massaging of the neck and facial muscles, that some teachers advocate, make you sing any better. It is undoubtedly of some benefit to "wrinkles," but not to the voice.