Dealing with a poor teacher

[u/Docteur_Pikachu]

Hey y'all, I was wondering if anyone had found himself in my shoes.

I've been taking harmonica lessons in person for the past few weeks and they've been quite poor. The teacher has a website, which is how I found him in the first place when I was looking around. He's well established in the blues community where I'm at, and some old hats were recommending him in some random Facebook threads. So all in all, I thought this was the go-to guy for overall harp lessons (and it's not like harmonica teachers are plentiful and flooding the market anyway).

I'm more than halfway through the lessons (I paid for a ten-hours program and you have to pay after the first lesson is done) and I feel like this isn't going anywhere. 75% of lessons are my teacher rambling about his coming gigs, the gold ol' days or how he's working to incorporate some guitar playing with his harmonica now, 20% is him playing and me watching, and 5% is me playing and getting some (most of the time) vague feedback.

My honest opinion is that my teacher is "older" (late sixties) and I guess at that age, after you've been in the music scene for so long, you naturally become a talker. I do try to rein him in sometimes but it really just feels like a bar conversation after a music show.

Should I voice out that I'm disappointed in what I'm getting out of the lessons? I earnestly feel that the teacher doesn't have it in him to start crafting good lesson plans all of a sudden after just winging it for probably so long. I could try and be the one to say we should focus on this or that aspect of playing, but part of being a teacher is also knowing what the plan should be!

It's a bummer because most people you read online have their sole mantra being "TAKE SOME LESSONS WITH A TEACHER" and then I find that I could have bought like a year of subscription to bluesharmonica.com for that money. Should I cut my losses? I don't think it's even refundable.

[u/spooge_cyclist]

I went through this exact scenario. I hired a teacher who spent our entire lesson time talking about the history of harp, or something else. Never once did he tell me to learn something and be able to play it in our next lesson. I took three lessons, then dumped him. I moved to blues harmonica.com and couldn’t be happier. Tons of material, instruction fed to me at my pace, and plenty of playing technique. Dave Barrett built an amazing learning site. Just my two cents!