I have just finished a long guitar course for middle school music teachers. We started in Aug 2013 and had 32 x 45 min group lessons during the year. The main goal was to teach them to teach chords. Btw, Estonia is probably the only country in the world where guitar is now in the middle school curriculum. After some years every single Estonian has at least touched the guitar. Anyways, the teachers did well and most of them really can form and play common chords. I tested it with our strumProfessor guitar game where their goal was to complete at least level 11. Most of the teachers liked the possibility to practice quietly at home without any additional stress. Although, some said the those falling chords make them a bit nervous 🙂

But about 10 teachers said that for technical reasons they could not complete the test on their computer. For them I had another test: they came in front of the class and played as many chords in one minute as they could remember. Different chords, of course. And they had to pronounce the chord names, too. The average was about 15 chords which is good enough for pretty much everything. But… No comes the point: in most cases the chords they took looked right and the shifts were quick, but the sound was fuzzy and buzzy and sometimes only one or two strings were ringing. That is probably why they couldn’t complete the automatic test: computer is stupid enough to expect the chords sound as we have told it they should. As a human being (although a musician) I apparently got fooled by the looks more easily 🙂 There are some interesting research papers on that topic, which I can introduce some time later.